Issue 17: Who gets a seat at the table? 🪑  October 31st 2023

Paul Taylor Interview: Meeting marginalized people where they are

After the summit, Spinning Forward spoke with Paul Taylor, co-founder and principal consultant of Evenings and Weekends Consulting. The following interview is an abbreviated version.

Spinning Forward: What’s behind the statement you made in your session at the CivicAction summit? You said something to the effect that the most important people - those left behind - are not at the table. There were lots of important people there.

Taylor: Important people to me are the people who are profoundly affected by the wicked problems that we face. Those are the important people that we need to be prioritizing. And I think it requires a fundamental rethink of one, who we think is important, and two, recognizing the way that white universalism has continued to leave many of us behind.

White folks are disproportionately tasked and resourced with solution finding for issues that disproportionately racialized people, and people with disabilities have been forced to navigate. So, I think that's actually at the crux of some of this.

It's who receives the resources, who do we trust, who do we believe, who do we value in terms of being able to offer insights to combating some of the wicked problems that we face?

When I think about food insecurity, I think about the ways in which largely middle class white folks have been allowed to dictate and decide the types of interventions that are most helpful, community gardens, or even any food-based program, when really at the crux of the issue, for so many of us is systemic racism and white supremacy. Until we're willing to have real and honest conversations about the inequities caused by anti-indigeneity and racism and white supremacy, we are not going to get further ahead.

Spinning Forward: Is the solution then to invite the people to the table who have fallen behind?

Taylor: I think it's about going beyond inviting people to the table, but actually taking a step back and saying, “Wait a minute, should I be leading here? Should I be the one driving solutions? Should I be a resource to drive solutions?” Or are there other organizations or groups that are more appropriate for us to be taking our cues from? And I think that's something that doesn't happen.

Spinning Forward: Does that mean those in positions of power and influence should meet people who are struggling where they are?

Taylor: Absolutely. It's about saying the space where young people are already, where they already feel comfortable, where people with disabilities already feel comfortable, where people who are low income already feel comfortable, where people who are racialized or indigenous already feel comfortable. Those are the spaces that we should be holding up, we should be resourcing, we should be supporting as part of solution finding.

When we force people to exist on the margins, they're forced to do just that, forced to exist and find ways to exist. So it's really important, I think, to take cues from folks who are navigating the injustice and who are finding ways to persevere, those are the first folks who should be articulating what needs to change.

Spinning Forward: How do we build trust with people on the margins?

Taylor: I actually think that it's not trust that needs to be built, it's actually power that needs to move. So we need to look at things like, if you want a tangible example, looking at things like how someone goes from being a low income person to being an elected official, to occupying those spaces in decision making rooms. How someone goes from navigating food insecurity to leading a food charity or working on policy, social economic policy.

I don't think it's about ad-hoc consultations or conversations about big issues. It’s actually about moving power and recognizing where solutions exist is not going to be in this room with some of the most powerful or highest paid people in our city.

And I think it's those folks that actually have to cede some power and recognize that they don't have the answers to the issues that have been disproportionately bestowed on people that don't look like them.

Spinning Forward: Do people in positions with access and resources prefer to focus on self-preservation? They want to be inclusive but often aren’t because their reality is different.

Taylor: It's not even self-preservation, I would say. It's that folks actually don't know what they don't know. So they can't be tasked with designing supports for communities for whom they have no lived experience.

Spinning Forward: Can you describe an example where decision makers don’t know what they don’t know?

Taylor: Let's take food insecurity. Our preoccupation when it comes to food insecurity with community gardens. Community gardens are great, and perhaps leaders of food-based organizations have historically thought community gardens are an important intervention when it comes to food insecurity. It sounds like something that makes a lot of sense.

When you look at, for example, a social housing site that has community gardens, the number of plots is not equal to the number of residents. But yet those types of interventions get held up as solutions when really, I think it distracts us from when it comes to an issue like food insecurity that's really about income.

We end up being distracted by these food-based responses that folks think are what folks ought to be able to have access to because that's what they have access to, being able to garden.

Sure, yes, being able to garden is important, but not positioning it as a solution to food insecurity. There's no data that suggests having access to a community garden has any impact on food insecurity at all.