Last night, on the eve of George Bush’s visit to Canada, 1.2 million canadians voted in a contest to select the greatest Canadian of all time. The winner was Tommy Douglas, the father of medicare and one of the furthest left politicians ever elected in Canada. He was certainly the most dyed-in-the-wool socialist who ever led a party (the Commonwealth Cooperative Federation). He formed the first socialist government in North America in 1944 when he became premier of Saskatchewan.

He quoted as saying “My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea.”

I am thinking to myself today that this shows the difference between our country and the one to the south of us. To put it mildly.

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!”