Keep Moving Forward

Path Consulting -- Canoe-Portage

December, 2021

E~B Strategy is becoming Canoe.Portage.

We are on our life path, paddling a canoe upon rivers and lakes. Sometimes we need to portage alongside deadly rapids, or on the land between the lakes. We paddle and portage, all the time, in so many areas of our lives.

Today we are facing climate breakdown, heightened racism and xenophobia, perverse income and wealth inequalities similar to pre-Revolutionary France, and a canada and british columbia that actively deny their ongoing colonialism and genocide of indigenous people.

In 2021, we are approaching a widespread acceptance that the Indigenous Residential Schools were sites of mass murder and genocide. The mass graves indicate a broader, systemic genocide beyond the killings of all buried in marked graves.

Canoe.Portage is a space to address what a new world can be, addressing a variety of toxic systems, with an intersectional lens. It is time for white people and male people to step up and do our work to dismantle:

  • Toxic Masculinity
  • the White Patriarchy
  • Systemic Racism
  • the ongoing Colonialism of the canada project
  • Systemic Climate Injustice
  • Income and Wealth Inequality
  • Economic Oppression
  • profoundly Discriminatory Capitalism

Being a Prosci-certified Change Managementor means I will be using a change management methodology to address these systemic problems in our society. This means being more intentional in our lives both with forced change and when we can control the change.

Watch this space for new work, and ongoing projects:

  • Toxic Masculinity and the White Patriarchy
    • White men are a key locus of oppression in our society, and historically. We simply cannot lean on the emotional, social and political labour of the people we are oppressing with our system racism, toxic masculinity and white patriarchy.
    • WE need to do far more to identify these systems, examine where they came from, how they reproduce through the generations, how we personally and individually benefit from them…all so we can use the entitlements we have inherited to dismantle these perverse systems created generations and centuries ago by aristocratic, white, racist, colonialist, patriarchal, slave-owning greedy psychopaths.
  • Arbutus Chest
    • The Arbutus Chest is all about helping economically, politically and socially marginalized people create greater economic stability in their lives as well as for their families and communities.
    • People don’t just become economically, politically and socially marginalized. Our culture has created baked-in systemic oppression that entitles the privileged. Our systems intentionally marginalize a whole variety of people.
    • The Arbutus Chest is a chance to help individuals and small groups create co-ops to take a more vibrant part in their own economic stability.
    • Economically marginalized people include, but are not limited to:
      • Indigenous people
      • the LGBTQS2+ community
      • People with disabilities
      • Youth
      • New immigrants
      • Neurodiverse people
      • Nonbinary people
      • Racialized people
      • Women
  • Principle 6 Tune-up
    • Co-operatives, particularly worker co-ops, have a profound capacity to empower marginalized people, create more workplace and economic democracy, imbue economic activity with greater moral intentionality and allow people to move past economic subsistence to more human and community self-actualization.
    • Co-ops’ Principle 6 is about doing business with other co-ops; this is critical for entrenching healthier norms in economic activity in our communities. The P6TU is designed to assess how your co-op is doing when it comes to stakeholder engagement, in a broad perspective, not only how well you are engaging with your members, but the broader co-op movement in your communities and beyond. Your co-op, AND your members and stakeholders, need to more effectively support other co-ops around you. We need to be more intentional about this!
  • BEYOND Health and Wellness for Teachers
    • Too often governments tell teachers how to improve their health and wellness, meditate more, practice mindfulness, all while cutting the K-12 and post-secondary budgets to sickening degrees. That’s just gaslighting.
    • I use a Change Management approach along with my Modern Labour Activism work to help teachers and professors move BEYOND health and wellness gaslighting platitudes, so you can innovate your practice, engage your peers and mobilize for a better future, for you and your students. I’ve got your back: book my time here.