Winnipeg, Manitoba

I’m here in Winnipeg this week running a series of Open Space workshops at a national Aboriginal Head Start and early childhood education conference. There are something like 1000 people here from all over the country, all of them involved in caring and teaching the youngest children in Aboriginal communities in Canada. We’ve been running short Open Space events to allow people to dialogue with each other in a peer-to-peer learning environment. We’re so hip we even have a wiki!

Among the many stories and best practices I’m hearing about here, one has stood out for me. I’ve been reading through a report called Early Childhood Care and Development Programs as Hooks and Hubs: Promising Practices in First Nations Communities. It was produced by the Early Childhood Development Intercultural Partnerships at the University of Victoria and authored by Dr. Jessica Ball.

The report is a research project that follows the early childhood development practitioners from three BC First Nations through their training at UVic and back to their communities where they transformed their programs from a problem- and needs-based model of fragmented services to a “hook and hub” model. The hook and hub model places childhood development at the centre of an integrated and interactive set of services. Chilhood development services are offered as a “hook” upon which other agencies, programs and professional can attach themselves. Soon a constellation of services emerges, with childhood development at the “hub.”

There are a number of benefits to this model. The two that stand out for me the most are the solid support hubs offer for cultural continuity and the way hooks, as practices of invitation, support community capacity and emergent leadership.

Last week I blogged about the Chandler/Lalonde study which shows that cultural continuity in First Nations communities, supported by institutionalizing community empowerment, acts as a powerful hedge against suicide. The hook and hub model is in line with this idea. It also offers a natural way for indigenous culture, language and community values to be passed on, because hooks and hubs are traditional ways of organizing. Thus:

Or, in the words of one parent:

So the hook and hub model offers an integrated container for the practice and transmission of culture and language, and therefore self-identity. It offers more than that to the community too. It offers a path for emergent leadership. The author defines a hook as:

This hook is an invitation, a practical example of living in truth. Offer what is needed and people will come and engage with you. And once you are running and people have hooked on, move into creating a hub:

The childcare program becomes a hub and familes and service providers interact with it in a way that strengthens community capaciity and leadership. And most importantly it does this in a way which is manageable, practical and scalable.

This study has a significant lesson for other communities and folks who see child development as a root from which a healthy community can grow. The author concludes:

My friend Rob Patterson on PEI and perhaps Ashley Cooper and others will no doubt find this interesting. If you want a copy of the study, you can contact ECDIP for one of your very own.

I’ve been a lifelong fan of radio. I have always listened, whether it was music in my youth or the inimitable CBC in my adult years, or late night classic radio reruns or Toronto Maple Leaf games. I have produced and hosted radio shows at Trent Radio in Peterborough Ontario. And when the internet really got going, I started using it as the best radio in the world.

I’ve always thought that radio was a much more intimate medium than TV. For one thing, anyone could do it. Building a transmitter isn’t that hard and when you finally get on the air you beam yourself right into people’s heads. With TV, you can turn away from the device and cut off your engagement with the visual. With radio, there is no escaping the device. It envelopes you in sound and demands your attention and imagination. It’s as if a web page got transmitted without the graphics and you are forced to fill them in based on the “alt” text.

Okay so that’s a little geeky. Still, I only really wanted to write this post so that I could link to PublicRadioFan.com, which is a real time schedule for pretty much every public, state owned and campus/community radio station in the world. I use this site all the time. So go there, realize the scope of what it offers and tip the owner, Kevin Kelly (no, not THAT Kevin Kelly).

A quote from Albert Einstein courtesy of Flemming Funch:

There is a whole chapter on this in Presence called “Science Performed with the Mind of Wisdom.” In it, the authors discuss the implications of science being done by people who think like Einstein and David Bohm. Using imagination, intuition and compassion to do science plays with the principle that Humerto Maturana once elucidated:

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American friends and colleagues. And, from a First Nations perspective, a hearty “you’re welcome!”

Over the past two days I have been facilitating a conference of First Nations health directors from around British Columbia. Every year or so, these folks gather to share ideas, learn about emerging trends and participate in policy development with government. When they go back home, these guys run health care systems in small First Nations communities, battling against many issues that affect First Nations health resulting in higher than average rates of diabetes, suicide, abuse, accidents, HIV/AIDS, communcable diseases and many other preventable causes of death and illness. At times I think the pressure of applying band-aids to the complex and systemic problems facing some communities can be immense and the challenges must seem insurmountable at times.

But today, I saw something that looks like magic. In the conference we had a presentation on a paper written in 1998 by two psychologists at the University of British Columbia, Dr, Michael Chandler and Christopher Lalonde. The paper is called “Cultural Continuity as a Hedge Against Suicide in Canada’s First Nations” and I think it’s one of the most important papers I have ever read.

The authors look at the role that cultural continutity plays in supporting invidual self-identity, especially among youth in BC Frist Nations. It works from a well-known correlation between supportive communities, healthy individuals and low suicide rates, but the reall contribution of the paper is that it outlines a course of action communities can take to dramatically lower rates.

To do this, the authors decided that they would try to identify factors that actually represented “cultural continuity” in communities and they settled on six:

• Land claims: First Nations were active in establishing claims for Aboriginal rights and title.


• Self government: a community has had some success in establishing their rights to controlling their economic and political independance.


• Education: First Nations run their own schools


• Police and Fire services: First Nations controlled services with community owned equipment


• Health services: Some direct control over health services


• Cultural facilities: including anything from a longhouse to a community centre and the whole variety of public spaces for community activities.

The authors looked at First Nations that had these six factors in place and found something absolutely amazing. Each of these factors provided a significant reduction in the rate of youth suicides. How much? Look at this table:

Now this is impressive. With some self-government in place for example, a community will reduce its youth suicide rate by 85 percent! But the authors discovered something even more amazing. In communities where these six factors are absent, the youth suicide rate is 137.5 per 100,000. That is 800 times the Canadian national average. In communities where all six of these factors are present, the rate drops to 0 per 100,000. You read it right. Zero. Not one suicide in the five year study period. By creating this kind of institutional support in communities, First Nations will literally save their children’s lives.

The authors conclude, rather modestly I think, that “communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.” If these six factors are present, you are much more likely to find yourself in a community where practices of care, sharing, volunteerism, shared leadership, and supportive relationships are present. I’m willing to bet that this fundamental but relatively simple institution building has a multitude of other positive impacts as well. In communities where suicide is a complex epidemic (800 times the national average! That’s a borderline crime against humanity!) having a clear path towards long term community health is a remarkable gift. It means that people can begin to tackle suicide and other mortality measures collectively, with a place for everyone’s responsibility in the long term outcome. We don’t need professionals or experts, all we need is sincere effort, solid citizen engagement and steady progress towards building institutions. The clear implication is that engagement in community and cultural life spills over into relationships and creates the supportive container that gives youth the confidence and sense of belonging and connection they need.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but holding space saves lives. This is toxin handling par excellence.

Amazing.