Slowing down to move ahead: How we work is just as important as what we do
Health Justice’s mission is to transform laws and policies related to coercive mental health and substance use treatment in BC. We advocate for the health care system to treat people with lived and living experience as full human beings with dignity and rights. This means advocating for a health care system that recognises them as holding crucial expertise that can help lead and shape the design of services, laws, and policies that impact their lives.
In trying to achieve this mission, we aim to model what we advocate for from the health care system in our own organization and how we do our work. We also didn’t want to replicate well known and problematic dynamics in the non-profit sector. Avoiding replicating these problematic dynamics means ensuring leadership in Health Justice is centered in the communities most impacted by our work, including people with lived and living experience of involuntary treatment.
That’s easy to say, but harder to do in a meaningful way! Here’s what we’ve done so far.
First, Health Justice is a relatively new organization (started in 2020), which means we had a clean slate for approaching things differently. We had no existing structures to dismantle to try to address these issues and no longstanding culture to shift. We had the immense privilege, largely due to support from flexible funders like the Law Foundation of BC and the Vancouver Foundation, to start the organization differently and think creatively about how things could be different from the ground up.
Our work to become an organization that centres power and decision-making in the communities most impacted by our work (and one that supports equity and wellbeing as we do it!) has and continues to require immense expertise, research, generosity, trust, thoughtfulness, and leadership from everyone involved.
Here are some of the structural steps we’ve taken as an organization to build and sustain community leadership in the foundation of Health Justice:
Governance: we adopted a governance model that shifts traditional power dynamics by centring the communities most impacted by our work. We use a model built from the Community Engagement Governance Framework as a way to rethink equity and power in the organization, which helps us establish a culture that supports meaningful and diverse participation in our work. Our governance model involves three governance groups who share leadership: the Lived Experience Experts Group, the Indigenous Leadership Group, and the Board of Directors. Using an ecosystem approach, our work is also informed by stakeholder groups indirectly impacted, like health care providers, family members/supporters of people with lived experience, and community organizations.
Organizational values: our organizational values are crucial in our work and our workplace culture. In particular, incorporating humility in every aspect of our work has been crucial to truly valuing multiple forms of expertise and diversity of thought. This has allowed us to explore the complexity of the issues we work on – it makes our work stronger and more effective – and respect that each person has expertise based on their own unique experiences. We actively embrace a diversity of opinions; our only requirements for participation in our work are agreement with our organizational mission, commitment to treating others with respect, and respect for differing views and experiences.
Recruitment: we utilize hiring practices that carefully and thoughtfully consider why the expertise and skill that come from life experience, personal identity, and social location are important job qualifications for each specific role. This involves moving beyond a diversity blurb at the end of job postings to think about the tangible benefits to the organization and the role that these experiences will bring and making it an actual job qualification, not a “nice to have.” It also helps us avoid performative tokenization or “checkbox” approaches.
Compensation: we are piloting an equitable compensation framework that financially compensates a variety of forms of expertise and experience beyond traditional professionalized experience and formal education. It’s a work in progress, but we do this because we believe if an employee’s experiences and expertise bring benefit to the organization, they should be compensated for it. We also take seriously the call to provide decent work by prioritizing secure and respectful pay, health and dental benefits, retirement benefits, and comparatively generous time-off.
Workplace policies: we adopt trust-based workplace policies based on a lens that moves beyond a sole focus on limiting risk and liability for the organization. Our policies are also based on feedback from staff about what would help them feel secure, included, psychologically safe, and able to do their best work. This has included things like flexible work hours, not tracking time outside of what’s required for legal compliance, building inclusive approaches into the foundations of our work to minimize the need for accommodation requests, a trust-based approach to workplace accommodations, and strength-based job design.
Working in relational ways: our whole team works hard to move beyond transactional or one-way interactions both with each other and with all people involved in our work, where we prioritize people first and work output second. This means we work to build genuine relationships that value every person as a whole person, and not just as an employee, a supervisor, a board member, or a person with lived experience. This approach means we all share the commitment to support others, and be supported by, other members of our community regardless of our position in the organization.
Collective care: in our recent strategic planning process, one of our four key priorities identified was to “nurture a holistic and transformative workplace” by ensuring all of us can support our wellbeing as individuals and as a community. This priority means finding tangible ways to resist the focus on urgency, efficiency, and outputs that often dominates the non-profit sector, leading to burnout, harm, and ableist practices.
All these aspects of our organization have and continue to involve care and intentionality to implement.
They didn’t and won’t happen by accident. It has required us to trust each other enough to work through the murky bits and continue to build and maintain our relationships in the process. Developing, maintaining, and growing this type of workplace is a lot of work, but the most important work has come from the people who have experienced significant exclusion and inequity yet have been generous enough to share their leadership and expertise to help us navigate this road together.
We try to constantly remember that this work does not have an end date; it’s something we must continue to prioritize together by dedicating resources, creativity, and attention to it.
It’s well documented that the nonprofit sector faces some big equity issues:
Boards that govern organizations often reflect colonial dynamics and attempt to replicate corporate, hierarchical power structures.
Board members often do not hold the expertise or experience necessary to understand the needs of the community.
People in leadership roles, with the highest wages and/or most decision-making power, are predominately white and do not represent the communities impacted by the work.
The “care penalty”, or the deeply entrenched dynamic of care-related work being economically undervalued, means that lower paying roles are more likely to be held by people who are Indigenous, racialized, disabled, women, and members of the 2SLGBTQ+ communities.