Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 175: From Dialogue to Action 鈥� with Shauna Sylvester
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Shauna Sylvester
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Kathy Feng 0:01
Hello listeners! I鈥檓 Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our host, Am Johal, talks with Shauna Sylvester, the former Executive Director of the 丁香园AV Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and the soon-to-be Executive Director of the Urban Sustainability Directors鈥� Network. Today, they discuss the various organizations that Shauna has set up to promote community dialogue and a renewable energy transition, as well as her 2018 mayoral run in the City of Vancouver. We hope that you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:43
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We're here with our special guests Shauna Sylvester. Welcome, Shauna.
Shauna Sylvester 0:52
Thanks so much Am and I am totally honored to be here because I am a fan of your program. This is great.
Am Johal 0:59
Well, I'm a big fan of yours Shauna, and I'm wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Shauna Sylvester 1:06
Sure. I am a mother, a resident of Vancouver, the outgoing Executive Director of the 丁香园AV Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and a professor of professional practice.
Am Johal 1:18
Yeah, Shauna, I met you a long ago, I just ran into you in person just about a week ago and I was saying, I think I was at the Britannia Community Center. I don't know if it was 1997 or 98, I think I was on the Student Union of UBC or something like that. And I just saw this amazing speech by this very articulate woman talking about, it was a sustainable community development conference, I think. And there was an international dimension that you were talking about. But I was like, who is that? Just in the sense of like, you had a sense of a vision of where you wanted to go with things and just wanted to be able to speak with you because I just thought, oh, this person's going places. And I like the kind of things she's bringing up. But wondering, you know, in the 90s, what got you into, you know, prior to your time at 丁香园AV, you were doing all sorts of non-profit community organizing work, but how did you get to be doing these things? And what brought you into social change and environmental work?
Shauna Sylvester 2:21
So, I think probably like you Am I started very young questioning just sort of what I was seeing around the world and questioning what was going on in my own community. Those who know me well know that that questioning took me to want to create my own order of nuns on Vancouver Island. So that was in, that was a long time ago. And so, I did actually start to consider going into the convent and actually starting an order of nuns that would look at the whole theory of justice. I was enthralled from the age of 14, what was justice? And thankfully, some time in Bolivia and some time close up to the Catholic Church I might have been joining made me question that decision, and I did not pursue it. But I did always have this interest, passion, orientation to looking at how could I use my skills and service to my community. And that really came from my upbringing. I was raised in, for those that looked at the Pope now, that's more of the kind of the Catholic church that I was raised in, a fairly progressive, social justice, social teachings oriented.
Shauna Sylvester 3:32
So, I got very active in the peace movement at the beginning, that was where I found my start, where we would have met was a bootcamp for community development practitioners. It's something that we created through SPARC, the Social Planning and Research Council, and I co-chaired the first Community Development Institute, and it went to different parts of the province and it was a gathering place, and education time, a time of training, time of exchange among community development practitioners.
Am Johal 4:03
Shauna, you later started IMPACS, the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society. I think you are located at the Dominion building with a whole bunch of other social change organizations and arts organizations there. But wondering if you can talk a little bit about the formation of that, you know, from your very local community development work to something that had much more of an international dimension.
Shauna Sylvester 4:28
Sure. And before IMPACS, I would say I had a foot in the local community, but most of my work was global. I worked with Cuso, Canada World Youth, others. I lived and worked in communities in largely looking at issues of women's rights, anti-poverty issues. And so out of that, it was in that work that I saw that non-profit organizations had so many solutions to offer, but they weren't very good at communicating them. And they weren't very good at advancing them at a government relations level. So IMPACS was really created, it was the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society, to be a vehicle to strengthen the voice of civil society, to strengthen its voice, and to really ensure that there were avenues where that voice could be amplified. So, it had both a focus on supporting and training non-profit leaders to be better communicators. And it worked specifically with media to ensure that media was open, accountable, and responsible and was a vehicle by which we would hear from public voices, from citizens voices.
Shauna Sylvester 5:43
The third thing IMPACS did is, we had a law that restricted charities, and restricted those that worked in pursuit of public good, from being able to engage in public policy. So, the organization, IMPACS, took that law on, and that was my master's program and I had people like Ed Broadbent on the board who was the former leader of the New Democratic Party. I had the former Foreign Policy minister from the Liberal Party, Lloyd Axworthy, on the board. I had Ross Reed, who was a Newfoundland Conservative, on the board, and many media folks as well. So, it was a it was a vibrant board and a vibrant organization working globally and locally.
Am Johal 6:27
And you guys organized or were involved with CIVICUS World Assembly at that time as well. It might have been in, maybe, the early 2000s is my memory.
Shauna Sylvester 6:37
Yeah, I co-chaired the CIVICUS World Assembly with the head of Imagine Canada. And that brought 1,500 people from around the world to Vancouver. And it was a showcase. It was kind of the umbrella gathering of civil society organizations, foundations, those working for the public good. It was kind of our international association. And that was exciting. That was a thrilling time.
Am Johal 7:01
I remember I think Kumi Naidoo came at that time as well and went on to lead Greenpeace and other really important organizations. Now Shauna, your relationship with 丁香园AV goes back in so many different ways and I know that you were involved in starting Canada as well. But maybe it goes back further from the time you were a kid, probably. So, if you could maybe start with how your sort of attachment and relationship to 丁香园AV began.
Shauna Sylvester 7:28
Well, I'm one of five kids. And my father was at Notre Dame University, Nelson, which is where I was born, was in Nelson. And I remember he packed us all up into the station wagon with the dog, and my poor mother. And off, we came down to live in Maillardville in a rented house while he did his PhD. And I think I was four at the time. And I really remember those years because we lived on a TA salary for seven years, as he did his PhD. And I think it was a time of volatility. And so, I think he had seven different supervisors and seven different PhD things. But I remember running the halls, the AQ halls when I was very, very young. And I remember, my dad was out to show a lot of young people that probably communal housing didn't work. So, he packed all of us up for a weekend of communal housing. And I think by the end of it, his students thought, yeah, no chance they would ever want to be a part of the communal house because they didn't want these five kids in their space. So, it was it was a wild time at 丁香园AV. And I was very young and loved it.
Am Johal 8:41
And when you came to work at 丁香园AV, you're involved with a program called Canada's World is that when you first started working? Yeah.
Shauna Sylvester 8:49
That's right. Yeah, well, before I did actually graduate from 丁香园AV, and I did occupy the administration building at one point at 丁香园AV. So, my history, it's kind of this place I call home, it's a second home. And I wanted to create something after working globally, for a lot of years, really worried that Canada's position in the global arena had really receded from what I was used to growing up. Canada was always this middle power, you wanted them convening a table, they lead on Human Rights Council, they'd lead on environmental issues. And then all of a sudden, nobody wanted us at the table anymore.
Shauna Sylvester 9:25
And I was watching this, and I was in Sri Lanka at the time, and my friends had just come back from a Human Rights meetings and said, "Wow, Canada's got a new nickname." And I said, "Well, what's that?" And they said "Shrub". And I said, "What do you mean?", because I was kind of taken aback. And he said, "Well, you were the insignificant plant that adorned the corner room, that didn't speak. But then when you did speak, you sounded like a little Bush." And this was the time when George Bush was leading us. So, I kind of, that that hurt because I cared passionately about foreign policy.
Shauna Sylvester 10:03
So, I came back and I interviewed about 200 people, leaders in foreign policy, academics, a whole range of folks. And I said, "What do we need to do?" And they said, "We need, we need a new narrative of who we are in the world. We can't continue to pretend we're these great peacekeepers. We've got to really come up with something that explains who we are now as a country, not who we were 50 years ago, and it's really got to come through an engagement across the country." So, Canada's World was born. And I remember at the time, I had four universities that had made the pitch of housing Canada's World at their university, and it was Mark Winston, that said to me, you know, this is really a dialogue initiative and it rightfully belongs at 丁香园AV's Center for Dialogue. So that's when I came to 丁香园AV as a fellow, leading Canada's World, which was a three-year initiative. There are, I think 17 universities, well over 100 non-profits involved, foundations, across the country involved in, in what was the largest citizen engagement initiative on Canadian foreign policy in our history.
Am Johal 11:09
Now, Shauna, you've took on an increasingly senior leadership role at the Center for Dialogue, including becoming the Executive Director, but there's so many projects that you had a hand in launching, getting off the ground, from climate change initiatives to engaging with local governments on pressing issues. But wondering if you can just speak about some of the programs that you've had a hand in because some of them have had such a great impact in the city, nationally, and internationally as well.
Shauna Sylvester 11:38
Well, I came off Canada's World and I was at the COP conference at the invitation of the Danish Board of Technology. And I went there with the idea of creating something that existed in the United States. And I was on the board of Mountain Equipment Co-op, it was this grouping of council, it was kind of like a council of businesses that were leading on climate. And I was looking at that and something that had come out of Australia, that was the climate council, and I wanted to create the equivalent of a climate council in Canada. And Stephen Harper had come into power. And through the COP process in Copenhagen, we had, Canada had become, you know, a country that had helped to negotiate the Kyoto Accord to actually receiving the Fossil of the Year Award. We were not well liked. Nobody wanted Canada at the table.
Shauna Sylvester 12:34
And so, I came back, and I did what I always do when I start something new, is I then went across and interviewed people, including CEOs of oil companies, to Greenpeace and environmental groups, and I really wanted to get a sense of, could we create the equivalent of a Canadian Climate Council. And what I heard over and over again, is, no. Anyone, any of the companies that had gone out on a limb and really started to develop out their clean energy work felt like they'd been kneecapped. And to quote, one person who said, "You know, we're not just, we're not just on the caboose anymore, we're running after the caboose." Everything at that stage was tied to what the US was going to do. And nobody really seemed to have a sense to where Canada's position was. And climate change was becoming a bad word.
Shauna Sylvester 13:21
So, what I heard over and over again, is we needed a space for conversation to really enable us to look at how we transition to a low carbon economy. And that's how Carbon Talks was born. So that was my first next initiative as a fellow, was called Carbon Talks. And that, after three years, we were really focused on what local governments were doing. Because really, cities were at the front end of dealing with climate, they were the best actors in the world, doing interesting things. I would have to say I want to give credit to the BC provincial government, when they introduced the carbon tax and other things. They were starting to lead a little bit as well in this province.
Shauna Sylvester 14:00
But I looked at Carbon Talks and I got challenged by some of our donors to scale up, they said, "You know, the IPCC report is showing that we don't have the kind of time it's going to take to continue to have these conversations. We got to scale this up." And so, we developed. It really came out of meetings in Europe, I was asked to go to Europe and for the European Union, facilitate the hearings on getting to 100% renewable, I didn't want to do that. I thought it was flaky. I thought, "What 100% renewable, that's not possible. It's just too out there for me." It was a World Future Council that it brought me in and, and I went, and I realized, I was the one-off base. It wasn't that 100% renewable was possible. It was inevitable. And we were just so far behind in Canada. So Renewable Cities was born and with the goal of tripling the number of cities that were committing to 100% renewable in five years. Well, that, we started from a low base, so it wasn't difficult to triple. We got there in a year in terms of the commitment. Now it was about implementation. So that was my next initiative.
Shauna Sylvester 15:15
And then after that, it was really our president at the time, Andrew Petter, coming in knocking on the door and saying, "Hey, I need your help. Can you create? Can you take this line in our vision about being the public square for our community, and can you create that?" So that was a third initiative, which was the 丁香园AV Public Square. So, the first five years, I was the Executive Director, but I worked with this amazing woman named Janet Webber. I knew that she was the right program manager from day one. And she applied six months into starting 丁香园AV Public Square, was the first full time person we hired. And now she has taken 丁香园AV Public Square and has really launched it into the stratosphere in terms of what it's doing. So those are, those are three other things that I helped launch.
Am Johal 16:28
That's amazing, and Shauna, in terms of engaging cities around climate change, you've done so much work, but also around housing and affordability, both in the City of Vancouver, but Burnaby. Wondering if you can sort of speak to a little bit of the housing and inequality issues that you worked on through the Center for Dialogue.
Shauna Sylvester 16:08
Sure, housing has always been a big issue for me. And I've never really understood why we grapple with it so much. Because I actually felt like we had really solid solutions. And it was really much more about the political will and what we were doing with our land base. So, I've worked on housing at the Center for years, there's been various ways. We did the Mayor's Task Force in Affordable Housing. In 2012, I think it was way back there for the City of Vancouver. And then I ran for mayor. And after I didn't, I came in third in Vancouver, but the week after the election, the new mayor of the City of Burnaby, I got a call from his office. And, it was Mayor Mike Hurley, and he said, "You know, this issue with housing in Burnaby, it's very difficult. I have been elected on a housing mandate, and I set up a task force and I'd like you to facilitate that task force." And I went, "Hmmm." This is not going to be an easy one. Because, you know, no matter what happens, if I'm facilitating it, I'm going to take the fall on this one, the mayor will not. It will be his task force, but he will not. So, I thought if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it the way I'm going to suggest it needs to be done.
Shauna Sylvester 17:52
So, I met with Mayor Hurley and his team and I said, "You know, you have a far bigger problem than just policy. You have a city that has gone through such a transition with the biggest dislocation of people we've ever seen in a community, through renovictions, and you need to engage the citizens of the city, the residents of the city in this conversation. So, I will do the task force only if my colleagues at the Center for Dialogue can be involved in a citizen engagement on this initiative." And I have to give full credit to Mayor Hurley, he didn't just say yes, it was how fast can you make this happen. And through the entire time, we worked with a stellar team of staff at the City of Burnaby. Every step of the way, we worked so hard, they worked so hard, over six-to-eight-month period, to deliver I think some of the best policy but also a new narrative led by my colleagues Robin Prest and Michelle Bested and the team on housing in the City of Burnaby. And I think if you look at what came out of that, some of the best policy, maybe even in Canada. The other thing I want to say about Mayor Hurley and council there, they didn't just set up a task force. 18 months later, they came back to us and said, let's bring those folks together again and evaluate what we've done. And we're going to be public and transparent about how well we were doing in the implementation. I've never seen that happen before in a city. And that for me was true leadership.
Am Johal 19:31
Shauna, I want to talk a little bit about your run for mayor because you know, especially in the City of Vancouver, which is, had an uninterrupted string of male, white male mayors from the formation of the of the city, wondering if you can speak just a little bit to the dynamics of you know what it means to jump into a race. You ran as an independent that finished a very strong third against the sort of main political parties so to speak. But there's a lot of barriers to people entering into political life. It's also, can be a very toxic media environment. But at the same time, as a candidate, as you go out and engage with people, learn about neighborhoods, learn to people's stories as well. There's so much you learn as a candidate going through the process. So, wondering if you can speak just a little bit to you know, jumping into a race and what you learned in the in the process about the city yourself and going through that and what kind of advice you'd have to other people thinking about jumping into political life.
Shauna Sylvester 20:36
So that was an incredible experience, I will say and I will say it was an incredibly positive experience. I think we went up 16 points in four weeks. So, I feel very proud about the team. And most of them were under the age of 30 that were working with me. I had a really good reason for going into it. I had been approached, and I, at the beginning, I think I was hoping I would be a candidate that a few different political parties could get behind. I think I was naive at that, I think, but having said that, a good friend of mine said to me, you know, you have to have a really good reason to entering that has nothing to do with the political game of politics. And I had been working with our president, really looking at democracy and how we were strengthening democracy in our country. And I said to Andrew Petter, I said, "You know, federally, it's too big, we can't, we can't seem to get a strong momentum going on democratic engagement, and provincially, it feels too big, but maybe I can try some things here. Maybe I can take an approach using dialogue to see if I can get people engaged in a way, they might not have otherwise gotten engaged." And our research at the center was showing that Canadians, and particularly in Metro Vancouver, we were seeing people turning away from democracy, not seeing it as its preferred way forward. Even seeing a rise in people wanting authoritarianism. So, for me, that was my passion, I needed to see can you turn this around.
Shauna Sylvester 22:12
I'm also passionate about municipal politics. I would say, going into it, at the beginning, and for those that are thinking about it, it's tough work. It's a tough slog. It's like, as I said, swimming in molasses at the beginning. I wanted to be so by the book on the financing, I wanted to be so clear, and make sure all of our team work from values and practices. I feel good about that. But it was hard. Because you're up against a machine, you're up against people who know how to run campaigns. So, I think there was a bit of a naivete for me. But once I got in it, and it was a group of young women, I was actually considering, should I step back. And it was a group of women and others that got together and said, "You cannot leave this race. Because at this stage, nobody has got policy positions. Everything about this race is about personality, and just the mechanics. We have to have policy in this fight. And we have to have a woman's voice in this fight, that's a strong progressive voice."
Shauna Sylvester 23:20
So, I, once I got into it, those last four weeks, I had a fantastic time. I got to see parts of this community I had never seen before, people's homes opened up to me, I did 38 dialogues around people's living rooms. I got to learn about, it, it was hard to knock on doors and get around as much as because people weren't opening their doors as much. But I got on to LinkedIn and treated it as if it was door knocking, and actually had real conversations with people. And I asked them, what did they like? What didn't they like about what was going on in the city? What did they want to change? And then I would enter into conversations with them about that. I learned so much from those conversations online. It was incredible.
Shauna Sylvester 24:03
So, the policies were real, they came out of dialogue. I then worked with experts to build up the best policies, I still stand behind all of the policies, we advanced through that campaign. And through the debates, I attended 37 of them, the eight that our current mayor attended, I held him to what did he stand for? I would often hear him say, "I came from Nova Scotia with $100 in my pocket." And that's all I'd hear over and over. No, you have to have a housing policy. Where do you stand on transit? Where do you stand on these things? So, I think that enabled a different kind of an election than we would have had otherwise. I mean, for once, assessments were becoming an electoral issue. I had sat on the Assessment Authority; I really was worried about small businesses and what was happening for small businesses on our high streets. I made assessment an issue during the election, we had so many things that became issues, we were talking about substance. So that felt good, that felt very good.
Shauna Sylvester 25:03
So, if you're interested, I want to see more diversity in the people running. I don't want to see another mayor that, you know, I don't want the same old I want to see. There is so many incredible people in the city. So many incredible women that have worked really, really hard and I want to see those spaces open up to enable that.
Am Johal 25:25
Shauna, I know you're going to be teaching in this Semester in Dialogue next semester. I've had the opportunity to be in that program, I think at least three times and it's been such a wonderful, joyous experience for me to be with a small cohort, to be in a class and really get to know people over the course of a semester. You know, a lot of other courses, you know, they're once a week as an evening class or a couple times a week and larger class sizes, that type of thing. There's something really special in what's been created there. And I'm wondering if you can sort of speak about your upcoming class, but also sort of broadly about the model of the Semester in Dialogue.
Shauna Sylvester 26:05
Sure. So, I am thrilled is the third time I'm teaching, and this class, for those that don't know it, is really, its a flagship. It's a program that other universities in the world look at as kind of really building democratic engagement, really building skills and confidence with students because its very student centered and cohort. It's a small group, 20 people up to 20 people and really focused on community. We're looking at trust, money and power, funding change. For most of my life, I've had to fundraise. Anybody that works in social change, that starts organizations, tends to be a good fundraiser, something that I have enjoyed doing. And I have spent a lot of my life nurturing and mentoring others in doing that, especially younger folks who want to start things.
Shauna Sylvester 26:52
So, I thought, there was a woman Dr. Jacqueline Koerner, who I have a great deal of respect for, who's done, as well started organizations, Ecotrust Canada, co-started it, and has worked on a number of foundations and thinks similarly around how we need to rethink philanthropy and how we can really use money for good.
Shauna Sylvester 27:12
And then Kris Archie, who leads the Indigenous Circle on Philanthropy, a really incredible facilitator, teacher, knowledge holder, and has transformed philanthropy in this country with a real sense of Indigenous reciprocity. So, together, we are co-teaching this course. And it will be a masterclass for students who might have an idea that they need support with, who might want to really think about transforming philanthropy in their own ways, or who may just want to get to know other students. So, it's a, I'm excited, it's got site visits, they're going to get a chance to meet with some of the people who have been my advisors over the years, a number of foundation heads. So, it's a great opportunity.
Am Johal 27:55
I was going to ask, Shauna about, of course, you're going to be leaving as Executive Director of the Center for Dialogue soon. We're obviously going to miss you here at 丁香园AV. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit about your new upcoming role.
Shauna Sylvester 28:11
Well, I gave my notice, as you do in the university, you give it way in advance, and I gave my notice, and said, "I'm going to devote this next part of my life to focus entirely on cities and climate," that passion that I have. I had no idea I would be interviewing for a position. I thought I was starting something different and new. But the Urban Sustainability Directors Network is the network of all the key people in cities in the United States and Canada, who are focused on sustainability, resilience, equity.
Shauna Sylvester 28:44
So, I applied for the position after being encouraged to do so. And I got the job quite astonishingly, I will say, because I am not an employee of a city. I'm not part of the USDA Network. And I'm Canadian. And this is a position that works throughout the United States and Canada. And they've mostly focused on the United States. So, I'll be working with over 2,000 sustainability directors. I will be you know, we have 230 cities that are actively involved in and I can't wait to work with a team of 25 across the country, both countries, to really support my passion as well, which is helping cities really get to net zero, but also get to a place of equity, and inclusion as well. You can't deal with the environmental stuff unless you're dealing with the equity issues as well. So that's front and center as well.
Am Johal 29:40
Shauna, now I know that in your time at 丁香园AV, at the Center for Dialogue, the place has been very dear to your heart. And you have such great relationships with your colleagues and friends that you've worked with there. When you imagine the future of the Center for Dialogue, this very unique place nested inside the university in terms of the vision and the context that it came from, under the leadership of Mark Winston, as well. If you were to come back to 丁香园AV, 10 years from now and think about what the Center for Dialogue becomes, what are the kinds of things that you would look to it for or what are your aspirations for the Center in the future?
Shauna Sylvester 30:21
Well, the wonderful thing is it's got such an incredible community of people surrounding it and just concentric circles of support for the center and what it does. I would see in 10 years, in my mind, there's a thriving host of dialogue that's Indigenous centered, which is in the works right now through the leadership of Ginger Gosnell-Myers. So, Indigenous people will feel that it's not just a place of connecting with the university, it's their space, where they're building out a whole practice of dialogue. So that's one piece, I would see.
Shauna Sylvester 30:57
I'd see that the teaching and learning, which is fundamental to the success of the Center for Dialogue isn't just happening in the way it does now, with this cohort model of the Semester in Dialogue. It's permeated every faculty at the university, it's brought that notion of interdisciplinarity, to real practice, that the student center cohort style of educating is not something that's off, it's actually embedded in every faculty. And we've started that process through Mark Winston in the Semester in, but it can go so much further. That the community of practice of dialogue and engagement, which is really from a scholarship point of view, fairly new in the last 15 years, 20 years has just burgeoned. It's huge. Now, I mean, we've got a graduate program, but we think it's got a bigger role to play.
Shauna Sylvester 31:48
Canada is known as this space where you can learn the skills of convening, of hosting, of facilitating, learn the skills of dialogue that are so critical to how we move forward. And that this is a Center where that's possible. So, it is a global center for knowledge and practice. And we're already seeing that with our climate engagement work our beyond inclusion work. So, it's amplified, all of the ingredients for that exist right now. And the people that are surrounding the center have the capacity to create and implement that kind of vision and take it to other places.
Shauna Sylvester 32:31
I think one of the things that I've learned through, and it's really been younger people, and it was when I first started Canada's World, and it was all staff under the age of 28 that said to me, "knowledge is not power, sharing knowledge is power." And so that network base, nodal way of working, where you're building and scaling up and everybody around you, to be better than you are, is, I think a way of working that young people, and particularly, you know, people that have come out of a network lifestyle have taught us and the Centre is that platform. It's such an incredible platform for action. And I only see it getting stronger and better and more impactful. You know, in 10 years, we need it. We don't have a lot of time on climate equity issues. I think of the opioid poisoning crisis that's going on in our city, we need these kinds of institutions that help us come together to have the kind of solutions-oriented conversations that we need to have.
Am Johal 33:42
Shauna, is there anything you'd like to add?
Shauna Sylvester 33:47
I think I want to shine a spotlight on a university that has invested in this kind of idea. One of the things that the Center is, is it's part of a whole constellation of engagement centers. You're part of that Am. The 丁香园AV Public Square, the various places where we are located in Burnaby, in Surrey, in Vancouver, each of our campuses take that on, and a university that invests in that, a university that understands how important it is to be in service of community, how important it is to be a driver and creating the democratic culture, is a rare thing. And so, I guess the last thing I want to say is I want to tip my hat to the people of 丁香园AV that have created this incredible institution. I have grown up here, we have a saying at the Center for Dialogue, it's the Hotel California, you can never really leave. I'm moving on into a different space, but I'm taking what I've got from 丁香园AV. And I'm bringing it into that space and I hope I will in turn be able to get back to 丁香园AV through the other networks I'm a part of and that's I guess my hope.
Am Johal 35:01
Shauna, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Shauna Sylvester 35:05
Thank you so much Am, and thanks for doing this.
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Kathy Feng 35:11
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by 丁香园AV鈥檚 Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Shauna Sylvester! Head to the show notes to learn more about the various organizations that Shauna was involved with. We release episodes every Tuesday, so make sure to subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcasting platform of choice to make sure you never miss an episode. Thanks again for tuning in!
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