Collaboration
Sometimes you make carefully thought out decisions and sometimes you make casual choices that lead you to important lessons.
My first jobs were working for small municipalities. Typical high school stuff: after school drama instructor and summer camp counsellor. Those work experiences and the connections I made with the staff at small-town recreation departments are what led me to apply for a university undergraduate program in recreation and leisure studies. On a whim I checked the box to add co-op terms to my degree and then found myself hustling for paid employment every four months.
Half way through second year I took a chance and moved across the country fingers crossed I would get hired as an Assistant Recreation Director at a rural municipality. There is a chance no one else wanted the short parental leave contract but I like to think I was just confident (cocky?!?) enough as a barely 20-year old to spout some newly obtained program development theory in the interview and land the post. A risk that paid off.
I learned lots that term. About local government, customer service, rural communities and program planning. The person I worked for became a true mentor with lessons and stories that still press and pull my workdays now. From him I learned the value of building a strong team and giving people the space to do the job you hired them to do. He always had time for a conversation taking our work seriously but the days lightly.
Most importantly it was the first time I had a job that required me to work with people outside my own organization. Every couple of weeks we would snake down a coastal highway, pull a wooden chair up to a card table in a community hall and flip open a lined legal pad. The agendas varied.
Sometimes we would be meeting with community members wanting us to bring more programs close by or re-grade the ball field down the road or help convince the local school to open the gym after hours. At those meetings I learned empathy, the importance of following-up and that an issue doesn’t have to be significant to me to be important.
But the meetings I looked forward to the most were with other municipal recreation staff. From the next town over or the one further afar. At those meetings there was always a hiss. Like that nod you give a fellow runner on your favourite route. Things fit into place. People spoke in a kind of code and understood each other. It was there — on that rickety wooden chair, taking notes on that lined legal pad — that I first saw resource sharing, networking and partnership in action.
We were paid staff working at impossibly small municipalities, putting out seasonal slates of recreation programming with minimum required registration numbers that provided the thinnest skiff of surplus. The success of these programs needed kids from the next town to come clambering over for our cool new program and so at first glance I thought we should be keeping our plan to ourselves until launch time.
But there we would be sharing with our so-called competitors what we planned to do. Our newly minted registration system. What worked last term and what didn’t. We would agree to stop doing programs that were popular close by and instead focus on unique programming or outreach to under-served communities. We’d share policies and program plans, contact information for great instructors and evaluation results — good, bad and otherwise. We came together to train crowds of summer staff rather than go it alone, pooling funds to hire a better facilitator or speaker and creating that familiar hiss for those young seasonal workers.
Those experiences — on a short university co-op term — have tinted my work in the non-profit sector. I have never hesitated to share policies, plans or programs. Tentative email requests to me are often met with my full suite of resources and documents. I constantly look for duplication and synergies often asking if the organization I am working for is the right one to be doing the work. I most often have worked in small or mid-size communities where having more than one anything could and should be constantly challenged. I take pride in the launch phase, in being part of seeding an idea or program, stepping back for its flight once the foundation has been built. I have always sought out my own network of external colleagues — people with whom I meet for coffee, make plans in parking lots outside meetings and seek insight and support.
At those community centre card tables years ago, I learned to look for and centre a common goal choosing collaboration and coordination over competition, doing the work with like minded people and never side stepping a bit of fun.
A casual choice. A risk taken that paid off. An early lesson learned and remembered.
