Chad Lubelsky

What is Santropol Roulant?

SantropolRoulant is a Montreal-based community centre that uses food as a vehicle to break social and economic isolation between generations and cultures. Creatively and collaboratively, we strengthen and nourish our local community with our novel approaches to active youth engagement, urban food systems, food security and community care.

What’s new this year?

In addition to preparing and delivering close to 22,000 home-cooked meals, this year we welcomed hundreds and hundreds of volunteers. We also significantly increased our impact and we’re particularly proud of the following new initiatives:

• our urban/rural farm exchange,
• garden and kitchen workshops for youth and Montrealers living with low-income,
• greening our building and its periphery,
• increasing the nutritional value of our meals, and
• growing our social-enterprise activities (so that hopefully one day I won’t need to be sending you emails like this!)

Programs and stats don’t tell our story though. The Roulant is a people place and throughout the year, we challenged ourselves to work in a way that was evermore effective, inclusive, and loving.

Why should you donate?

At the Roulant one of core principles of engagement is treating people as gifts. This means appreciating and celebrating  everyone as a whole person that is imbued with many dimensions. We do this because we see our community members flourish when we provide them with the space, time, and resources they need. They in turn nourish Santropol Roulant even as they themselves are nourished, and the boundary between giving and receiving becomes increasingly blurred.

Our annual holiday brunch which we held yesterday afternoon (not great photo below)
is a beautiful example of the blurred line between giving and receiving at the Roulant. Ostensibly it was for our clients, and they did have a great time, but I think staff and volunteers had an equally good time and received as much benefit as our clients. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, and that is exactly the point. (My friend Rennie calls this type of blurred line “the giving field”. To read more about it, click here… but please, not till you’ve read till the end of this post)

To our thousands of volunteers, small moments like today’s brunch define the Roulant as a unique place where they’ve been given a chance to flourish and learn to lead with bravery, gentleness, and decency.

For our clients, the support they receive with each delivery of a warm, healthy, and nutritious meal helps them live with dignity in the comfort of their own home.

For all members of our community -clients, donors, volunteers and staff alike- Santropol Roulant is a place through which to discover that we can make a powerful difference in the world around us.

For all these reasons and more I am asking you to join me in donating to Santropol Roulant.

It’s easy to make a donation directly online via my giving page at CanadaHelps.org. If you’d rather donate via mail, you can click here to print a donation form.

Thanks  for considering this request.

With love and gratitude,

Chad

Last week I was at the Tamarack Institute’s Communities Collaborating Institute. Being there shifted my thinking about our work at Santropol Roulant and how I can best support it.

At the Roulant, in addition to the daily essential service we deliver, some of our work is also as a playground / leadership development institute for social change agents /  early adopters.  Our work in this area is part of what makes us a living organization and is one of the reasons that the Roulant is recognized as a change leader.

We are constantly striving to increase the impact of our social change efforts and I think Meg Wheatley offers us a potential path to do so. She argues that we need to be creating Communities of Practice for new leaders:

“the community they (leaders) belong to is a community of practice, not of place. The community forms among people acting from the same values and visions. Their practices are varied and unique, but each practice develops from a shared set of values. In this way, the community is very diverse in its expression and very united in its purpose”

We do lots of different things at the Roulant and tying them all together sometimes feels like an awkward juggling act. Given this, Wheatley’s call to distinguish between expression and purpose is incredibly helpful. Quite often saying what you do means fitting into a box, but separating purpose and expression opens up possibilities for action.

Exciting as this is, anyone who has ever tried to create space for lots of different kinds of expression knows that this is very difficult and requires much of the individuals involved. This is where personal change comes in.

Embracing a diversity of expression means being open to whatever happens. The best way to being open to what happens is to be ready to change ourselves. In other words, to effect change, we have to change. Again, not easy work. This is why Wheatley argues that  the greatest challenge for those working in social change is to serve with bravery, gentleness and decency. 

This triptych of qualities resonates deeply. On the surface, expecting bravery, gentleness and decency doesn’t seem like a lot to ask, but, genuinely acting this way is quite difficult. Or, at least it’s quite difficult for me.

Here’s the thing though, seeing the relationship between personal change and large-scale social change, I’m motivated to do all I can to best support social change at the Roulant. And if that means I need to change too, then so be it. It might be difficult sometimes, but the impact of being brave, gentle and decent are well-worth the effort.

Last week I was in Boston for the Awesome Summit - a micro philanthropy / crowd funding / Internet conference put on by the good folks at the Institute for Higher Awesome Studies.

 The first part of the conference was the inaugural meeting of all    the Awesome Foundation Chapters.  I was there as a member of  the Montreal Awesome Foundation.

Passover is easily my favourite holiday.  The delightfully familiar food, the sprawling celebration table and the telling of a story everybody knows, all work in concert to make for the best night of the year.  There is no doubt as to why this night is different from all other nights.

Perhaps, perhaps, the only drawback, and this is to be expected given the heavy emphasis on ritual, is Passovers lack of surprise.  That’s why I was happy to be taken aback when looking through Jonathan Safran Foer’s New Hagaddah. In the introduction, Foer writes that the Seder is a “radical act of empathy“.

Whoa.  Radical Empathy? I had my Passover surprise.

Thinking of the seder as an act of empathy – let alone a radical one – stopped me cold.  I’d never thought of the seder through an empathy lens before.  But then, with just the tiniest bit of reflection, I started to see where Foer was coming from. The Haggadah implores the reader to put themselves in the footwear of their forebearers.  The overriding message is that living well today means being in relationship with the actions and sacrifices of our ancestors.

This ritual connection is why we tell stories.  It helps us build empathy and provides a pathway to understanding an experience different than our own.  A good story lends itself to discovering shared values, dreams and humanity.  The thing is, empathizing with a protagonist is easier to do when we see our own history in the story, and the me listening is part of the we of the story.

This is why I don’t believe that Passover is about radical empathy.   Radical empathy would mean empathizing with the other, the foreign, even the vilified.  Yes the Haggadah is about empathy, but it’s not radical, it’s traditional.  I am being asked to empathize with my fellow Jews.  There is very little empathy for the fallen enemy in the story of the Passover.   What a wasted opportunity to broaden our horizons.

Imagine radical empathy for a moment.  Maybe when asked to honour our heroes, we would also have the courage to create space to empathize with our supposed enemies?  I’ve never tried it, but I suspect that it’s exceedingly difficult to congruently demonize and empathize.

Passover teaches empathy, but why should I have demonize in order to empathize.  We can have one without the other.  Is that really so radical?

Certain points in the year lend themselves to thinking about time.  Its passing, how its spent and whether we are doing all we can with it.  New year is one of those times.

I appreciate the excuse and the opportunity to reflect and am trying to take advantage of it.  I think it natural to plan for the year ahead and identify goals and objectives.  What do I want to do this year?  What is the best way for me to spending my time?

But future planning can conflict with an equally strong urge to live in the moment.  How can I make the most of what I am doing right now?

What do we do when our need to plan conflicts with our need to live in the moment?  For both individuals and organizations it’s a vexing question.  We don’t want to sacrifice the future to live better now, but we also don’t want to sacrifice now for an uncertain and impossible to control future.

Finding the right balance is key.  Even if it is a moving target.  One thing is for certain – we have a better chance of hitting the target, if we know what we are aiming for.

I’m trying to remember that as I commit to spending the first six months of the year living in the moment (My amazing job at Santropol Roulant ends in June) and then use the second half of the year for longer term planning.  The temptation to figure out my very uncertain future is strong, but I have faith (albeit it does waver) that success in the moment will translate into future success.

Smart organizations do this all the time.  Focus on the here and now, but don’t forget to plan for the next big thing.  Applying this lesson in our personal lives is hard but ultimately more rewarding (and maybe even makes our work and our organizations more effective).  Win win.  It just takes some time to get it right.

Happy 2012!

Last week the Montreal Awesome Foundation awarded its first grant.  You can read my blog post about it here.  The event went well –  we are starting to build momentum, we enjoyed a beer or two, and it’s exciting to tap into and participate in the thirst for small-scale people-centred change initiatives.

At Santropol Roulant, one of our tenets is that how we do something is as important as what we do.  At the Awesome Foundation, I’m beginning to understand that the how might actually be more important than the what.

First round grant winner Bobbi-Jo might disagree, and we are still in the early stages so we have no what to point to, but so far our how – a group of people giving $100 each every month to support an awesome idea – is what seems to be garnering the most interest and attraction.

When I talk about the Awesome Foundation, everyone wants to know more about the process.  Interest in the grantees pales to the keenness to know more about how and why a group of individuals decided to take action.  Is it possible that the interest and consequent attitudinal change engendered from our conversations might be the greatest change we are bringing about?

It seems counter-intuitive that talking about giving away money brings about more change than the actual money, but maybe it isn’t.

Sadly, the reasons not to take action and try and affect change are often far more compelling than the reasons to do something.   It’s hard to feel like any one individual can make a difference and even if you think you can, it’s hard to know what to do.

But what if changing the world was simple?  What if changing the world could happen through a series of small gestures?  The Awesome Foundation opens up this possibility and therein lies its great power.  The Awesome Foundation is inspirational, aspirational and accessible.  The Awesome Foundation is change and proof positive that how we do something is as important and sometimes more important than what we do.

It feels good to be reminded that even though our problems are complex, sometimes our solutions are deceptively  simple.

Last week I was in Toronto for a workshop on Platformation (mobilizing IT tools for the charitable sector).  Matt Thompson gave the opening keynote and he implored us to fail Early and fail often – A key component of rapid prototyping.  He called it part of Web 2.0 thinking.

As a philosophy I couldn’t agree more with Rapid Prototyping.  Try something quickly, learn from it, adapt and try again.  It makes perfect sense.  The thing is, when  push comes to shove, and we turn theory into practice, the spectre of failure is daunting, risky and at worse paralyzing.  To embrace rapid prototyping, we also have to embrace risk. Failure in theory is a logical and often necessary prelude to progress.  Failure in practice can be painful and, when public, maybe even humiliating.

Yet, nothing would ever change if we didn’t take risk.  I always encourage the organizations I work with to take risk, but taking personal risk is infinitely more difficult. This is one of the reasons I am taking what for me feels like a big risk: starting this blog. I know that if I truly believe in and want to encourage risk and rapid prototyping, and if I hope to have any standing when I encourage others to do the same, I need to live my values.  Even though my heart is beating a lot quicker as I type these words and get ready to hit publish, I hope and expect to fail early and fail often.    It’s not easy but then that’s the point.

Last night at Le Mood I spoke on a panel where we were asked about our vision for food security or food sovereignty.  Our answers mostly dealt with problems (we need to support farmers, have more local agriculture, increase access, etc).  All important and all needed but none of them visionary.  Frankly, I thought we could and really needed to do better.  Especially given that we the event was meant to motivate youth.

“Kids Running to School”.  Best vision I’ve ever heard.  Simple, direct, and teasingly evocative.

Visions should inspire, celebrate, help us dream and shine a light on our best possible selves.  It’s a tall order.  Fortunately, the magnitude of the challenge is superseded by its importance.  Building a powerful and effective food movement means having a clear, compelling and concise vision.  Food’s power lies in its capacity to transcend, connect and nourish.  We need our vision to do the same.

I’m speaking at  Le Mood on Monday.  The Panel has a great name:

Below are the guidelines.  Any thoughts?  See you Monday at 7:30!

• First round of questions: Facts - what do you know / what have you seen or experienced in your work with respect to issues of food, health and/or the environment?
• Second round of questions: Opinions - what do you think about the situation? What are your three main concerns?
• Third round of questions: Visions - what can/should be done / Where should we go from here?