Culture of Access event - Dec. 3, 2021 Paul Menton Centre, Carleton University TRANSCRIPT: CAS Presentation [Instrumental music] [Amanda] Today, I'd like to introduce our presenter Cathy Malcolm Edwards. Uh Cathy is going to be talking about the "Accessibility Through the Lens of the C-A-S". With 25-plus years of experience in research and academic environments, Cathy Malcolm Edwards has an enthusiastic appreciation for the power that research and education have to improve the lives in the world we live in. Her approach fosters open dialogue, promotes collaborative engagements and results in high-impact stakeholder relationships. Cathy Malcolm Edwards identifies her "why" for accessibility as discovering dignity through design. She is passionate about co-creating positive change in the world using an empathetic approach that values living and lived experience. So Cathy, thank you so much for being here today and I really look forward to your presentation. I'm going to turn it over to you. [Cathy] Hey! Thank you so much, Amanda. Good afternoon, everyone. I want to start by acknowledging the diverse life experiences that are here today. Each person's path is worthy of being honoured. Canada has been making strides towards a more inclusive country but those changes have only really begun to take shape recently. These changes can allow us to have deeper connections with one another as we work through barriers of language, stigma and bias. I recognize that the language used and thoughts that I may share today can lack representation for some of those participating. So, I acknowledge that I am a work in progress and I continue to learn. It is important to me that this is a space for openness as well as education. And, while I may disclose some of my own personal experiences, there is no expectation for other students to do the same. Above all, I just really appreciate you making time to be here and listen to me this afternoon. Your "why" is the reason that you show up in the first place, at least according to Simon Sinek. I believe if you know your "why" you will figure out your "how". My cousin Tommy had spina bifida and hydrocephalus. I remember one visit we went to the playground when I was a kid. While I was climbing over the play structures, my cousin Tommy was sitting there on the grass just watching. It was at that moment I remember realizing that the world wasn't fair or equal. I went and sat with Tommy and we brainstormed a way to rig him to the zip line that was on the play structure and I'm talking one of those very cautionary 1970s play structures. The experience ignited a passion within me. I knew that I wanted to use my voice and my position in life as a way to create positive social change for others. Tommy, he inspires my "why", discovering dignity through design. Now imagine if the world can support dignity and compassion by being more accessible. I never thought it could be me. I was a competitive athlete growing up dabbling in many sports. I was also an honours student. In my mid-teens though, I began to experience both temporary accessibility issues that soon started to become more episodic. But I had no idea of the permanent changes that were coming over the next few years for me that would leave to- lead to lifelong health issues nor did I imagine the exceptional support that I would receive particularly over the past three years from my friends and colleagues at Carleton that empowered me to start talking publicly about my own mental health challenges. And, while I don't wish the bad days on anyone including myself, I truly often feel privileged to have empathy and compassion for others who are on a similar journey. So, I want to reflect a little about what is your "why" for accessibility. I think for a lot of us that our "why" is somewhat implicit but the challenge is, by leaving it implicit and not revisiting it and finding a way to make it explicit, we might be logged into complacency. So, when you think about accessibility, what is your "why"? Is it a particular moment? Maybe it's a person. Something you believe strongly in? Perhaps it's a phrase that sums up your approach to life or maybe you're still discovering it and that's okay. If dignity through design is my "why" then I consider CAS being a part of my "how". At Carleton, the Coordinated Accessibility Strategy, which I refer to as CAS, C-A-S, it could be our collective "how". CAS is a value-based strategy that's been founded on inclusivity by creating opportunity for every person to participate in all areas of campus. Innovation that strives to be trailblazing, collaboration by engaging both internal and external community members, as well as commitment by putting words into action and, above all, community that collectively challenges ableism. By anchoring our processes services and programs as well as our infrastructure in these values, we can actually increase the dignity of our interactions with each other. We can build on the messages of attitude, trust and thrive as a community as spoken about and shared by our panel. Representation. Throughout the development and implementation of CAS, the aim has been diversity and accountability. In the initial stages, a consultation- extensive consultations were put into place and a steering committee was struck made up of those with living experiences of disabilities as well as much needed allies. They collectively represented the diversity of voices that you might find on campus including students faculty and staff. As a team, the committee met to critically analyze the strategy in all its various draft stages both before, during but then as well after each of the feedback phases. It ensured that as a group, the steering committee was doing the best that they could to reach the greatest amount of stakeholders and community as possible. All feedback was also made public on the website and after it was stripped of all identifying information. So, on the screen right now on the right-hand side is a hub and scope type graphic that lists the seven areas for CAS. In a clockwise position starting at the top, it reads: coordination and leadership, education and training, information and communication, physical campus, employment and employee support, student support services and research and development. Collectively, these make up our seven areas of focus for the strategy. It's important for me that these seven emerged out of community feedback because it represents the priorities of the Carleton community. We're now in the implementation stage and the first step of the process was to understand the context in which the strategy exists and how to implement while remaining committed to a human-centered approach. And as Larry had pointed out, implement but also take action. So, throughout the fall 2020, comprehensive stakeholder maps were actually created by an amazing co-op student who was working for us out of the Industrial Design Program at Carleton. It was a necessary step to map the processes out and the stakeholders out to be able to better understand the complexity as well as the extent of the stakeholders involved on campus. This also ensured that, as actions would be taken, we would have a breadth of representation from the voices. We also are pleased to have on-campus partnerships. So, I feel like this part is like when you're watching an award show and that person gets up there and then they forget to thank the most obvious people. So, I apologize in advance. If I forget you, you know who you are and cookies will follow. I am grateful for the support and leadership of our president, of our four vice presidents at Carleton as well as many organizational units but I'd really like to particularly emphasize the support and the leadership from READ, the Paul Menton Centre, the Office of Quality Initiatives, Facilities Management Planning as well as Teaching and Learning Services. All of these groups have been instrumental in the intensive work that has been led by 25 individuals on campus and those that have been supporting- supporting them during what has been and continues to be exceptional times. We had executive champions as well as action plan leaders made up of working groups that created recommendations for the action plans to be implemented over the next 12 to 18 months. These working groups developed plans that reflected the diversity of voices and initiatives on campus and also included to focus on outside of individual and organizational divisions. There's also a larger council that meets that includes more than 30 representatives from campus life. I would be remiss if I didn't take time to acknowledge the work of our co-chairs for Coordinated Accessibility Strategy and that would be Adrian Chan and Boris Vukovic. Both of them probably hate me right now for calling them out but their collective experience, leadership and insight is what keeps us grounded as we move forward. On the next slide, I'm going to try to walk you through a grid of some of our activities that we've undertaken. The grid will be made up of four quadrants to help prioritize and cluster the strategic actions that we're taking. I'll just pause for a little bit of water. There's an x-axis that crosses the bottom and it runs from difficult to simple. It represents the ease of implementation for the university. But really important is the y-axis and it's running on the left-hand side and it represents the importance to the broader Carleton community. It ranges from low to high. So, I'm going to just review this counterclockwise starting in the lower right quadrant. In this section, we call it utility. Utility is useful but perhaps it's not necessarily as important to the Carleton community. It likely represents more incremental steps for campus accessibility and is something that we might find we're doing just as an everyday part of our process, but maybe not with intention for it to be accessible, but it is helpful. Next, we have the quick wins in the upper right-hand corner. These represent activities that we've been undertaking that might take up to 18 months to get underway. They are extremely important to the community, there's little to no new resources required and it may represent more significant steps forward when we talk about the culture of accessibility. So, examples of some of our quick wins. One of the big ones is enhanced training. We're- we are in the process of working with our on-campus partners to update AODA modules. We're exploring the expansion of the student support certificate with an increased emphasis on accessibility. We are also going to be engaging in discussions about how we can actually embed accessibility more meaningfully into all training that's happening. We're launching a CAS speaker series and also want to highlight that on the website hashtag that's, I don't know how to say the hashtag otherwise somebody can come up with it, the number sign, uh #AbleTo um website you can also look at learning modules that have been developed in partnership that allow us to build capacity for disability inclusion at work. There's the creation of a living experience advising groups. So, there's combinations of the Teaching and Learning Services, Paul Menton Centre, READ, Web Services as well as Office of Quality Initiatives working together to develop advisor groups made up of living and lived experiences so that we are designing with, not for, when it comes to our teaching, education, learning strategies, web accessibility. As mentioned by Larry, we are in the uh I would say the homestretch of the completion of the campus audit. We're using the Rick Hansen audit tools as part of that. We have researchers in accessibility underway where we're building on a successful event that was hosted by the Office of the Vice President of Research International and READ is continuing to work with those researchers, building up this community and supporting an increased profile of accessibility research at our university. The Student Accessibility Champions Project continues as a pilot within READ and we're hoping to continue to raise enough funding so that we can expand it beyond the pilot into a permanent program. And very honoured that today Rebecca is here. She was one of our inaugural ones and um hopefully maybe Patricia has been able to join us in the virtual audience as well. I'm immensely grateful for their continued dedication and leadership. We also have an accessibility wellness series that a lot of you have participated in and Paul has spoken at that is in partnership with Healthy Workplace. This is where I start to get excited. But before that, I realize I forgot to indicate that there are small asterisks or stars next to some of these events or activities and this is simply to represent activities that are in um some form of progress. They are in a state of happening. So, our our big bets- our big bets are in the upper left-hand quadrant and these are big bets because they are extremely important to our community. It involves multiple focus areas working together. These are what will move the needle on the culture of access at Carleton. They do require significant investment, though, from resources of the university and often represent multi-year projects. So, there are a list of some of them up there today and these lists are by no means exhaustive but it is important to extend our culture of access. Whether this is through READ's contributions as a center of excellence and accessibility or continuing to work with our sister strategies of the strategic integrated plan or the Canadian Accessibility Network, this network was launched, my goodness, I believe it's two years ago today or this week and is the secretariat of it is at Carleton with Suzanne Blanchard at the helm leading the governance of the network. Canadian accessibility network connects individuals and organizations across multiple sectors including private, public, not-for-profit, as well as community service providers, advocates and allies across Canada this means that they're engaging with more than 85 Canadian collaborating organizations and individuals to identify gaps and opportunities for advancing accessibility. I am so pleased to say that we have an extensive benchmarking project spearheaded by Cindy Taylor around employee and employment support. It is just in the stages of wrapping up and they're now going to be looking at developing a comprehensive report including recommendations to meet the needs of our campus community. There is addition - there is also exploration of additional academic programming that builds on the collective advances and contributions based on our understanding of disability and accessibility. And lastly we are going to be launching a pilot project early in 2022 that is going to conduct an internal scan to learn what accessibility skills are on campus and what kind of supports could be put in place to increase our campus capacity. Before moving on to the next slide I just want to highlight the area in the bottom left corner. This is unwise. Not important to the community, very difficult to implement, costly, requires a lot of resource and certainly doesn't fit within the scope of the strategy. My goal is that we never have anything that shows up in that quadrant. It's important to note a cast is not an end state. It requires us individually and it requires us to commit to build on our history and accessibility by moving towards our vision of a more accessible campus and world. But it doesn't end at a vision. It requires coordination of our services, programs and initiatives that exist and requires us to take action to continue to inspire a strong campus culture of accessibility and inclusion. So the future, the future is bright. The future of CAS, of accessibility at Carleton, it is not up to me, it is not up to the Paul Menton Centre, it's not up to READ, or our panelists or our senior leaders. It begins and ends with each one of us who are part of the Carleton community. It requires us as individuals and collectively to determine what our north star is our guiding light that we step by intention. Now we're getting to some work for you. Think a little bit back to that question I had at the beginning around "why." Earlier this afternoon we learned more about the legacy of Paul Menton. For a lot of us we can also share stories of Larry's legacy and lasting impact. Personally, for me, I'm here in part because of Larry. Because of what he did, the confidence he had in this campus community, but as me as an individual. He's also a reason, or at least I like to think so when I'm blaming him, for why I took on grad school. The idea of a legacy can be a loaded concept if not completely overwhelming. If our "why" grounds us perhaps our legacy is an investment in our future. I think it was Warren Buffet, I think it was Warren Buffet who said something like someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. What is the legacy that you want for CAS? In a few moments I'm going to ask you to share, no more than three words or so that reflects your intention, and we're going to be using Poll Everywhere. There will be instructions. But as we get to that just think about the idea of accessibility seeds. I love camping. I love the idea of being surrounded by trees and I think of those trees right now. The seeds that were planted, the nurturing of the environment that happened over decades to produce - produce these beacons. Can we do the same for accessibility? If the idea of a legacy for Carleton is too big a concept for Friday afternoon, are there seeds of accessibility that we can scatter and nurture together as a community so that there is accessibility shade for tomorrow. [Amanda] Thank you so much, Cath. There are some questions and comments rolling in, but I will describe how everyone can describe what their - their legacy will be. So, please join by using a web browser. Go to pollev.com forward slash PMC, or you can scan the QR code that's up on the screen now. After that you will enter your answer or click on the answer options for each question as it appears on your screen or you can open your text message app and text PMC to 37607 if you have not already joined. If you've already joined simply text your answer or your answer choice, um, example "a-b-c" etc.. Looking forward to hearing what your feedback looks like. Cathy, you're getting a lot of comments coming in too about how great your presentation is. Larry specifically has mentioned uh um you know you were overly kind in your words and you're doing a great job. [Cathy] Aww, thank you, thank you. So, I'm hopeful that the poll is live but I'm also prepared that technology could be challenging at this time. [Amanda] Well we'll see if it works but maybe while we're waiting for people to roll in we can get started with, uh, there is a question here around CAS because you were talking about AODA, so the accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities act, maybe that's where a legacy could lie, is in changing policy and legislature, but I don't want to influence anybody's responses but how will CAS complement anticipated AODA post-secondary education standards? [Cathy] Well that's a really good question. Why do you get the tough questions on a Friday afternoon? Um so, I think what's really important to note is that CAS was not formed because of AODA. AODA and other standards are a way to ensure a minimum exists but I think at Carleton we've always strived to do more than that. I don't think we've ever been comfortable settling for complacency. And so there is activity underway right now where there is a group looking at the AODA post-secondary standards recommendations related to that and what we are doing is surveying campus, which we've done, we've provided a response to, um, to the group - working group that has been formed by the government looking at these standards, and we are keeping track of how our activities map to that, um, to more look at areas of how we might be able to streamline reporting and those aspects but also to see and be able to start articulating as a community where we are excelling, um, and where we might need to improve. And - and I think that's where, uh, the standards, uh, will work for our community. [Amanda] Awesome. It looks like the poll is working now so we can get some feedback about legacy. So we have answers rolling in here that say everyone on campus can explain what accessibility means to them, belonging and safety, culture of kindness with professors, leaders, to be honest leaders, all members of the Carleton community feeling that accessibility is relevant to them, shared sense of ownership, uh responsibility empowerment, and our community to continually increase accessibility, grassroots movements towards compassionate care, moving forward in a totally inclusive way with greatest supports from all the gold standard of service. Those are all of the responses running on about an awesome legacy, so um, I am recognizing too that we're getting close to the end but, uh, go ahead Kath, in terms of that legacy that we're leaving it sounds like a lot of people have some pretty stellar ideas. [Cathy] That is, um, I'm a little choked up actually. It's so amazing to see that and to see that on a day such as today is is so important. So dignity through accessibility, it's gonna be hard to get through the end of this, um, I would like to - like to close off by reading this reflection by Virginia Satire that my husband shared with me earlier this week: I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen by them, heard by them, to be understood and touched by them. The greatest gift that I can give is to see, hear and understand, and to touch another person. And when that is done, I feel contact has been made. When I think of accessibility at Carleton and reflect on the journey of us getting here, I can think of no greater future than to, as Paul said earlier, to thrive and flourish. To be heard, to be understood and to give back to others in return. So thank you for this time and space and for your participation today. Happy to engage in conversations and happy to have your ideas of how we can continue to challenge ourselves to move forward. [Amanda] Thank you so much, Cath. We do have some other questions there and I will let our audience members know that, um, you know, keep your questions coming in because we will have them answered afterwards. But Cathy, uh, what you said was so moving... thinking about the why, thinking about our legacy and I know that it's going to be a conversation that is continued to have as a result of CAS. So Bruce, I am turning it over to you to wrap us up for today. Thank you so much again, Cathy. [Instrumental music]