Archive for work-life
Hiatus
I will be taking a leave of absence from my home website until Labour Day or thereabouts, to reflect, to rest my verbal brain, and to ‘deep clean’ and reorganize my old and silly sensorium. I am sending happy vibes to you.
Comments off
December!
It’s been slim pickings around basil.CA of late. Fall is my stacked teaching schedule. Lots more, if not soon, then *pretty* soon!
PORKLANDIA
Another beautiful bike ride through Olympia … first time I ever saw any bacon, though, was today – on 26th Ave.
Acting Together
For its first two and a half years I was the “knowledge dissemination adviser” for the Acting Together research project. Based at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and funded by a federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research grant, the project’s goal was to identify “positive” characteristics that help Surrey, BC-area teens stay out of gangs. My role involved helping to create the project’s website as well as various other multimedia materials, including a video program shown on Shaw Cable TV. This week the project is hosting its “capstone” conference.
From the news release:
This week, over 200 researchers, policymakers, police officers, parents, youth and community members will meet to discuss how to reinforce strengths in youth that will prevent their involvement in violence and gangs.
Building on research conducted over the past five years, Acting Together (AT-CURA) – a federally funded research project based at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) – is hosting a three-day conference in Surrey that will focus on the sustainable ways in which communities can empower youth to make positive life choices.
Titled Youth Strengths and Prevention of Delinquency and Gang Involvement: Academics and Community Acting Together, the conference will present research, strategies and ideas to a sold-out audience on topics including: how focusing on strengths equips youth for lifelong success, how to build strengths in youth, the work of Acting Together, nurturing youth resilience and ending gang life. The conference will end with a moderated panel on bridging policy and practice.
“Our youth are our future. Ensuring their well-being is our collective responsibility. Parents, police, policymakers, teachers, front line workers and academic researchers must all work together to protect our youth from wandering down the dark alleys of a dangerous life in gangs,” said Dr. Gira Bhatt, the project team director and principal investigator of AT-CURA. “This conference will offer an opportunity to collectively share knowledge, research, expertise and experiences on how we can best target violence and gang-prevention.”
“CIBC is proud to be the presenting sponsor of this conference that is tackling this difficult topic head-on as it is only through the collaboration of all of our community stakeholders that change will happen and young people will be empowered with the skills and strengths they need to make positive, healthy choices…and reject violence,” said Mike Stevenson, senior vice-president and region head, B.C. and the Northern Territories, retail distribution, CIBC. “With a focus on helping young people reach their full potential, we believe it is by educating and engaging young people as they work through the many challenges of adolescence, that we will not only save kids from a life of violence but also build stronger communities.”
Keynote speakers and plenary session leaders include academics internationally recognized for their research, professionals with decades of experience working with youth, and individuals who have experienced first-hand the consequences of when violence and gangs meet a lack of awareness and education.
“The remarkable work of the AT-CURA project and academic researchers at KPU, in conjunction with the support and partnership of the various police agencies in B.C., and community leaders in the province, has resulted in the development and implementation of a number of gang-prevention initiatives in the community,” said RCMP Acting Assistant Commissioner Dan Malo. “By arming the public with information derived from years of research, we are empowering the community to take a stand against gangs, as well as deterring youth from falling prey to organized crime.”
Dr. Bhatt and Dr. Roger Tweed, co-investigator and lead research for academic studies with Acting Together, will lead the conference programs.
They are joined by the RCMP Chief Superintendent Dan Malo; Dr. Michael Ungar, an internationally recognized youth resilience researcher based at Dalhousie University and co-director of the Resilience Research Centre; Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener, author of several books on positive psychology for professionals, happiness and courage, and; Dr. Kimberley Schonert-Reichl, applied developmental psychology and associate professor in the department of educational and counselling psychology and special education at UBC.
Author Katy Hutchison will be the event’s community forum keynote. Now a professional speaker, Hutchison has shared her story of forgiveness at TEDx, and across Canada via print, radio and television. Her book Walking After Midnight: One Woman’s Journey Through Murder, Justice and Forgiveness details her journey through the trauma of family tragedy and healing. Hutchison has been an advocate for educating youth and communities of the risks associated with unsupervised alcohol consumption by young people.
Conference sessions and presentations will take place July 24 and 25. A reception and opening ceremony, with a welcome address from Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts and greetings from BC Ministry of Justice Deputy Minister Lynda Cavanaugh, will kick off the event this Wednesday.
For more information, visit: atcura2014conference.ca. The conference program is available here.
Acting Together received a $1-million Community-University Research Alliance award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada in 2009. The project’s research has identified factors that potentially protect youth from violence and gang involvement, and has helped develop community-wide strategies derived from those findings. The KPU-led project has championed and led unprecedented collaboration between service agencies, community organizations, government and academic institutions across the region. Learn more at: actingtogether.ca.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University has been serving the Metro Vancouver region since 1981, and has opened doors to success for more than 250,000 people. Four campuses—Richmond, Surrey, Cloverdale and Langley—offer a comprehensive range of sought-after programs, including business, liberal arts, science, design, health, trades and technology, horticulture, and academic and career advancement. Over 19,000 students annually have a choice from over 124 programs, including bachelor’s degrees, associate degrees, diplomas, certificates citations and apprenticeships. Learn more at www.kpu.ca.
(cross-posted at NoContest.CA)
Simpleness
My recipe for making people happy:
- Tell parents that their infant is beautiful.
- Tell neighbors that their dog is beautiful.
- Tell little children that their bikes are fantastic.
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Facebook friends append some ingredients to my recipe:
- “Little kids also like to know that you love their sneakers.” (thanks to S. M.)
- “Also, tell them their lemonade is good. Buy a second cup.” (thanks to @bfwriter)
HR
From my wonderful friend Agata Zasada, Human Relations dynamo:
So many times managers forget the journey it took to hire an employee, from last year’s budgeting, the job descriptions, interviewing and making a final decision. Many things can change over the course of time, so it’s important to realign your new hires purpose, expectations, measures of success and what the first 90 days should look like (or whatever number of days). Here are some things to consider and get you started.
Old personal notes
Coming back to Vancouver from New York City … waiting for Cathay Pacific to load …
The greatest gifts
To have a child who loves you.
To have students who show up.
And to have a lover who pays attention.
But that would be rude.
I was an extrovert until April 20, 1992. That was the day after Easter. I resigned from my position as Senior and Acquisitions Editor at Prometheus Books Inc. on that day and began a journey that took me from Buffalo’s East Side, to New York City, and then to Stanford University, and, at last, to Vancouver.
I spent that Easter in Toronto. I was there to appear on a 90-minute-long talk & debate show on CBC TV on behalf of Prometheus Books and its two sister organizations (here and here). I don’t actually remember what the topic was but guess, since this was Easter, it was “Near Death Experiences,” often a popular subject during the Easter season back in the day. After the show, which was exhausting, I went out into the city, which was dead, so I bought a dozen or so magazines and returned to my hotel and had some drinks from the mini-bar and read for hours. Back in Buffalo the next day, I cleared out my office after the business manager at Prometheus rejected my expense report, saying it exceeded the allowable per diem. I became an introvert the moment I left the building, and never went on television or did a radio interview again.
Back in New York City a few weeks ago, I went to a bar in Little Italy to have a shot of tequila and a beer while waiting for my sister Jenny to swing by the neighborhood for dinner. I’d hardly sipped some tequila when a fellow at the bar started talking to me about how a wife can now track her husband via the GPS in his cell phone and see what he’s doing, live, online, because web-cams are used in all the bars now. “No kidding!” I said. The bartender joined the conversation with a funny wife-with-GPS story. A woman got up from her table and came to the bar with her own tale. Within seconds, it seemed, seven or eight of us were engaged in loud, intense and very fun conversation. When I got up to leave, to meet my sister, my new friends offered to buy me another round to get me to stay. That sure was tempting.
I left that bar feeling strangely great, and not just Cuervo Gold strangely great but truly elated, as if I had found a treasure, or remembered a most important password or secret. I was on a train going from Manhattan to Buffalo a few days later when I figured out what I had found and remembered: *This* is what life had been like, *this* is what I had stopped being, decades ago, a gregarious man living in places where people wanted you to be gregarious. What did I have in common with the people at the bar that could make our conversation so immediate and intense? We were in the same place, and that was enough.
I flew back to Vancouver the third Sunday of Lent, two weeks before Easter. I walked out my front door the next morning and felt something I had never felt before in Canada: that I was in a foreign country. I am grateful that this feeling soon ebbed, and is now gone.
My students and some of my Vancouver friends have heard my Little Italy story, all of them agreeing that that type of conviviality simply does not exist in BC. One student noted, “Of course it doesn’t. That would be considered rude.”
Here we look after others, but we leave them alone.
(Originally published April 30, 2011. Beautiful goodbye card by Dena Bowles, Stanford University, 1995)
Goosebumps
This new ad, titled “Missing Work,” was created by Bell Canada for its “Let’s Talk Mental Health” initiative. It captures a moment – a short routine, really – very common among the chronically depressed. It is staggeringly understated and beautiful.
(cross-posted at nocontest.CA)
Leaving Olympia
Eastside Big Tom Drive Inn
My second summer in Olympia, Washington comes to an end in a few days. It was a good time: I gave up television and swearing and I visited Big Tom’s twice, eating in the parking lot. I did some reading and writing, prepared for my fall classes, grilled portobello mushrooms and delicata squash, and spent some time with friends. I drank a lot of coffee and then biked or walked around trying not to get busted people-watching.
I am going to miss this comfy place: its gardens, tags, and tattoos; the skateboarders and the jewelry peddlers; Capitol Lake and Sylvester parks; Last Word Books and Orca Books Inc.; and the lovely welcoming vibe everywhere.
Tomatoes from the backyard.
Hitchhiking
As a young man, if I had to sum up my essence into a single quality, I would have said, “I hitch-hike.” Nothing meant more to me.
I was obsessed with the communications interaction hitching a ride provided: Standing on the roadside with my thumb out, I could assume that the very next person I saw would be (1) a stranger and (2) somebody who wanted to talk with me.* Situations in which both such things would be true simultaneously seemed otherwise rare in my experience. Conversations brought into being by these situations enthralled me. I doubt I could discern the lies from the truth, the earnestness from the BS, any better than I can decipher these things now. But I could always count on being surprised by the words I heard; I could always count on feeling grateful and lucky. Indeed, hitch-hiking made a virtue out of loneliness; receiving a ride seemed a holier blessing.
I was indeed aware that one could not make a good living out of hitchhiking. One could and did, however, scrape by. Drivers were by and large pretty generous. (One desperado spent his last dollar buying me a hamburger. And a lady from Florida once gave me a pillowcase filled with grapefruits.) Making a living *writing* about hitching was not an option; that genre had lived and died by the time I hit the road, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady having left us in 1969 and ’68, respectively.)
It hadn’t occurred to me, though, that I could aspire to becoming a “professor of hitchhiking.” That would have been the perfect job. (Curriculum: “We will study the styles, methods, and rhetorical forms of ‘the hitch’; the road and the law, throughout history and across cultures; etc.”) But that gig doesn’t exist, so far as I can tell. If it did, I would be doing the next best thing, though, teaching communications to wide-awake and sometimes way-out-there students where I do. But since that particular gig doesn’t seem to exist, I’m doing the best thing *period*, with what I have to offer.
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*There were exceptions: You might run into people you knew on oft-travelled routes, and sometimes drivers’d pick you up so that you could take the wheel while they napped shotgun.
Addendum on mentoring
When I was contemplating running for Chair of my department a number of years ago, I consulted my mentor at Kwantlen, David Wiens, asking him whether I’d be any good at this position. “You would,” he said.
I asked him why, expecting him to pay homage to my brilliant analytical and people skills.
“You like to work hard,” he said, and left it at that.
It was the best thing he could have said. David was a really good mentor.
Some notes on mentoring …
… can be found over on basil.CA sister site NoContest.CA here and here and here. They are mostly based on the superb presentation given by Erin Dick at the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in Manhattan last month.
To be honest, I had intended on *missing* this presentation, believing there was little for me to learn on the topic. In a spasm of self-awareness, though, I understood that my reluctance to go was based on arrogance – and arrogance means that I had grown too comfortable with my ways. I wondered, too, why I seemed afraid to subject myself to new insights on a theme so dear to my heart.
Fear can lead to poor mental hygiene.
I forced myself to attend by making a promise to do so to my friend Sarah Jackson, a fearless young journalist who herself will become a wonderful mentor one day. I am glad I went. I learned a ton – and found I have lots to work on.
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