Involvement - it was literally at the top of the list of my personal values 30 years ago and it’s still there now. 

The pre-amalgamated City of Toronto of the 1990s was a terrific first employer. I arrived armed with a graduate degree, a sense of humour, and the enthusiasm of 23 years of living. And nothing else. It was luck and maybe that sense of humour that emerged in the interview that got me a job as a management trainee funded by the Ontario Municipal Management Training Program. It was a time when jobs were very scarce.* The door of City Hall locked behind me with a hiring freeze that lasted several years making me the youngest person in most meetings. With little competition and mentors like Barb Caplan (I blogged about her here), I got opportunities others might not have. It was also a time when the civic service recognized that to achieve excellence in service delivery, it had to invest in its human resources. That’s how I ended up the baby among a couple of dozen City managers at a three day residential retreat outside Orillia, exploring how to best serve the City of Toronto. It was a formative experience, without which I would not have been promoted so quickly as a manager. It is astounding now to consider that any government could justify such an expenditure. But they should. Management is a skill that needs to be nurtured like any other. 

This winter, as I continue to chip away at the purging project I started (along with everyone else) during the pandemic, I found my notes from that long-ago training session, reminding of a time I’d all-but forgotten. One exercise I recall involved poster paper, magazines, scissors, and Elmers Glue and instructions to create what today we might call a “vision board,” by first looking deep inside and creating a visual representation of how we felt as managers and then a second representation of our goals as managers. The reflection of how I felt was of a tiny young person in the lower right corner of the page, swamped by the enormity of everything else on the page. I clearly questioned my ability to succeed knowing I was an infant in a grownup role. I wish I still had the poster to to refer to remind myself of the transitory nature of self-doubt during similar present-day moments. Does anyone ever really conquer imposter syndrome?  

While my 1995 vision board was jettisoned sometime in the last 29 years, from my trunk of memorabilia emerged a page entitled “Checklist for Personal Values.” It’s a list of 90 values or ideas with instructions to pick the 10 that are most important for a valued way of life. Through a guided process of elimination, we had to reduce the 10 to one we cared most about.  

Looking at the page, I am amazed at how consistent it is with how I would complete it today. 

Using a bold black marker, I started by crossing off obvious things: adventure, nature, religion, wealth, and having a family, all consistent with my memory of who I was then, but also consistent with who I am now. There are a number that I put arrows beside, and then later crossed off. No surprises there either. They were clearly in the running for top-10 status but didn’t quite make the cut. The chosen 10 were: achievement, arts, decisiveness, efficiency, friendship, honesty, independence, involvement, location, and responsibility/accountability. I eliminated five, and then two more and finally got it to just one: involvement. 

I was right. Involvement has motivated throughout my life. If I’m not in the thick of something - cello-playing for 15 years, macrameing and sourdoughing during the pandemic, and now writing - I don’t want to be connected at all. For me, there’s no point in operating on the periphery, as a bystander.

What surprises me are some of the ones I struck off in the first round, ones that would rank more highly now especially ecological awareness, helping society, and public service, particularly surprising since within just a couple of years, I’d go on to work in an environmental organization.  With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I’d done more, sooner, and been more vocal about it but environmentalism was just starting to hit the mainstream then and many of the social justice goals that spur me on now - housing and inclusivity, for example - just didn’t have the profile then as they do now. 

One of my current work projects is writing profiles of the people who’ve significantly contributed to Toronto’s co-op housing sector in the past half century since the founding of CHFT, my employer. Without exception, I am struck by their level of engagement. As young adults in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they each took considerable risks and made significant personal sacrifices to push the housing agenda, creating communities that thrived then and continue to do so today. Jobs, however, were not as scarce with the 1980 unemployment rate in Canada at 7.5 percent, must lower than 10 years later when I joined the labour force. 

I was the same age when I completed that values-prioritizing exercise, and while involvement rose to the top of my list, it wasn’t linked to improving the world. While boomer kids were busy fighting the man and protesting wars, my generation, Generation X, had to focus more on making a living. So while wealth was eliminated quickly from my list of possible values, money wasn’t. Career related values were necessarily on my list, because in a bad economy they must be. 

I think some see my need for involvement as related to ego or attention-seeking. Probably. But it also feeds my need to be engaged in doing something, contributing to something bigger than myself, trying to make a difference. With the privilege of the financial security that comes with middle age, I have the stage where my involvement can be targeted more towards social good. And that feels good. There is no question. 

* take a look at this website here to see how stunningly bad my timing was to join the labour force. I was very very lucky to land the job I got. It is no wonder the City stopped hiring shortly after I arrived, a freeze that lasted for a few years, as I recall.   

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