Women in 2020 Summit
November 2019
In partnership with NS Advisory Council on the Status of Women and Tatiana Fraser of System Sanctuary
Funded by: Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women and Women and Gender Equality Canada
With the 2020 decade at hand, the timing was right for a large-scale event engaging a diverse and inclusive cadre of Nova Scotia women from across sectors and boundaries, to share perspectives and aspirations in the forward movement of women’s rights and gender equality work in Nova Scotia.
Together with Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women and the System Sanctuary, Be the Peace institute offered a full day engagement to bring a system and complexity lens to the broader field of gender equity work.
Mo Drescher of Brave Space helped capture the day’s learnings in a graphic recording.
This eco-system approach is a way of seeing, sensing and tackling gender equity work as an integrated whole with interdependent and intersecting parts. Viewed in this way one can see connections and gaps, opportunities for collaboration and innovation, and leverage points for systemic and social change at multiple levels of scale, all operating in tandem.
The purpose of the Women in 2020 Summit was to convene key actors in the gender equity ecosystem to reflect on where we have come from and use the current trends and challenges to inform collective direction in advancing women’s equality and well-being in Nova Scotia over the next several years.
Some specific objectives were to:
Bring women and gender-diverse people together to examine where we are now, and what’s next for the women’s movement in Nova Scotia.
Support learning, leadership and collaboration among women in advancing gender equality and addressing systemic inequalities.
Locate ourselves in the system, seeing interconnections.Reframe conversation and gender equity efforts through a system lens.
Explore how systems change happens and what we can learn together to inform future efforts in this regard.
Questions we explored:
How are we/will we advance women’s equality and well-being in Nova Scotia over the next years?
Through what means will this happen into the future?
What does leadership for this gender justice effort look like and who will be involved?
Goals and anticipated Outcomes included:
Fostering camaraderie and support among women and gender-diverse people in challenging masculine- dominated structures, systems, institutions and dynamics in the service of equity and positive outcomes for well-being.
A shared understanding of where we are now and the common aims that are pulling us forward.
A growing sense of the unique leadership capacities among women contributing to social and systemic change.
Inspiration for one’s own practice of building women’s leadership capacities and influence for gender equity and justice.
“The gender equity issues we face are highly personal and individual, effect families and whole communities. They are also institutional and systemic.
Our organizations, institutions and systems are full of good people trying to do the ”right thing” in systems that are remarkably inoculated against change and with entrenched patterns that continue to replicate outcomes we all sat we do not want.
It is this realm we want to explore more deeply; the ways the issues and dynamics remain entrenched, and also in how we can work with new tools and lenses to create the change we all yearn for.
In some ways, we have barely moved the needle after decades of work on how many women suffer the trauma of violence and the social injustices of patriarchy, racism, colonialism, isms of all kinds - still in soon to be 2020.
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Staff from the NS Advisory Council on the Status of Women welcome participants.
Sue Bookchin (Be the Peace Institute), Annika Voltan (Inspiring Communities) and Tatiana Fraser (The System Sanctuary)
Participants engaging in discussion on key challenges and opportunities for women in 2020.
Systems and feminist practice already align in many ways, but intentional use of a systems lens in gender equality work may unlock new levers for systemic change.
A note about Transition Theory Model:
This approach understands that systemic problems need systemic solutions. Issues like violence against women and inequity based on intersecting racial, gender and sexual identities benefit from a systems perspective to inform and strengthen efforts across sectors and silos and help us to look at intersectional inequities differently. The summit endeavoured to look to the future and examine systems and connections between gender equality, economic security, and safety.
Transition Theory, as a systems thinking tool, is a means to understanding three key and interacting levels of actors, environments and innovations within our systems. As one puts pressure on the other varying degrees of social change occur. The niche level (where radical innovations happen) influences the regime (our institutions and infrastructures), which in turn has an eventual impact on our landscape (social and cultural norms) and is the slowest to change.
Tatiana Fraser of The Systems Sanctuary helped guide our discussions through this process to pull in key information on how we engage in social and systemic change for women in Nova Scotia.
The Transition Theory Model was shared by Tatiana Fraser at The System Sanctuary
Some final takeaways…
The event was very full of content about complexity and system change perspectives, as well as small group activities to apply the tools to participants’ current work and vantage points. Many remarked that the event was very instructive and provided them the opportunity to learn this new equity/systems thinking language and perspective as well as to connect in new ways with colleagues. For many, the summit helped to expand their network of those committed to gender equality work. The conversations were engaging and provocative in sensing into the potential value of the tools and grappling with placing current initiatives and activities onto the mapping frameworks. It is this process of deciphering, debating and learning together, that is essential in early stages of building eco-system capacity.
Women of Nova Scotia: 9 Historic Changemakers
Halifax painter Jo Napier created the Nova Scotia Nine portrait series on display at the Women in 2020 Summit with help from the Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women. The Nova Scotia Nine is a collection of large-scale, contemporary paintings of women who lived extraordinary lives and made a difference here in Nova Scotia.