Together Towards Tomorrow: Local Organizations Advancing Community Wellbeing and Connection

By: Sarah Doyle, Jenny Rose, and Chloe Harvie

Organizations Highlighted: Front Street Community Oven & Every One Every Day Kjipuktuk / Halifax

At Engage, we call social connection and a sense of community ‘the glue that holds us together.’ If you feel the glue around you thinning lately you might not be alone. Our 2019 Quality of Life data painted an interesting picture: that experiences of social isolation decrease with age and that younger adults are feeling the worst."

This is one reason why our recent Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) program focused on providing collaborative opportunities at the local level to explore and support unconventional yet impactful approaches to enhancing the quality of life for Nova Scotians across various sectors, regions, and demographics.

Several students through Acadia’s Department of Community Development chatted with local organizations Every One Every Day (EOED) in Kjipuktuk / Halifax, and The Front Street Community Oven (FSCO), in Wolfville. Both organizations are working to re-imagine community connections and encourage skills building close to home that forges deeper connection across differences.

Through the SDG Program, we quickly learned that although the SDG agenda hones its own terminology and framework, members of community are progressing and working towards those same goals in their own ways, and in their own words.

And these localized perspectives and ways of doing are powerful for the nourishing of a healthier, more inclusive Nova Scotia because they attune to our specific needs, challenges, and opportunities.

Advancing wellbeing at the local level

Every One Every Day staff host a community tent with artistic activities for youth and families.

Tammy Mudge the Assistant Director at Every One Every Day shares that their work is "helping to break down barriers to learning in a real hands-on way."

Located on Gottingen Street in Kjipuktuk / Halifax, EOED aims to help bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals together to discover skills and aspirations for programming in their community. Space and resources are provided for folks to deliver their own skills-building sessions for community members.

“It could be as simple as helping people change the oil in their car, or building social cohesion and confidence in our local residents,” shares Mudge. “Sometimes people don’t know they have a talent until they have the opportunity to try something new and share their gifts. EOED makes the space for that to happen.”

Front Street Oven Executive Director, Duncan Ebata sees that when people cook together over a fire in the park, eat together, set the table together, and co-create community space with each other, unlikely combinations of people end up advocating for each other and collaborating to shape a community that is more inclusive, caring, and just.

“It's these unlikely groups of people that tend to change the world. We see this every week.”

- Duncan Ebata

A family enjoys making their own pizza at the Front Street Community Oven in Wolfville.

Every Thursday evening in Wolfville, the Front Street Oven provides a place for people in the community to share their love of food and connection. Engage’s partnership with the Oven involved funding a narrative project to bring the story of this unique initiative to life. This project helps the Oven engage the public and funding organizations in further conversations about why quality of life conversations are for everyone.

Approaches to the work

Mudge identified their ‘circle of change’ as a way of achieving the organization’s goals of social cohesion and resilience. This theory of change is framed around a circle because, as she remarks, “we don’t see the way to our overall impact of co-created and cooperative communities as a linear path. It’s a circle of constant learning, feeding, and nurturing.” 

Mudge also spoke about ‘Kokum’ – meaning ‘big old tree’ in Mi’kmaw – which is the truth and reconciliation framework used by their team as “a way to monitor and evaluate our everyday actions.” She explained that this framework is a way of highlighting the actions EOED is taking toward reconciliation and is a way of holding one another accountable for these actions. 

In imagining the growth of their organization Mudge says the Indigenous lens is important when looking at community. “Our approach helps use two-eyed seeing and centers on considering nature for example, when building transportation options and considering how people and our natural environment influence that.”

She shares, “In a way we want to go back to communal living and sharing resources and social infrastructure that allow simpler and healthier living for people and the planet.”

Ebata spoke about “re-imagining connection” in a way that brings everyone a sense of belonging, regardless of who they are and where they are from. 

What’s getting in the way of making this kind of work sustainable?

Despite their many successes, it’s evident that small local organizations like EOED and the Oven experience a funding landscape that can make it challenging to sustain the work.

Ebata speaks to how funding timelines are often too short to help build trust in community and between communities. 

"Being able to grow to cook inclusively with 5,000 people every year has required creating dozens of new processes for the gathering itself, stewarding a multi-stakeholder group, and co-designing interculturally. Despite all the talk about inclusion, funding staff time to do inclusion work and design processes to carry out inclusion work is extremely underfunded,” he shares. 

Mudge also mentioned: "Program funding is often limited or is siloed to a specific use or program. If funding was opened up in a broader context and over a long term period it would help make the goals more achievable."

Mudge and Ebata also mentioned the impact that community work can have on social impact workers, including burnout, loneliness, and the need for rest. Mudge explained the importance of, "learning the ebbs and flows of when we need rest, and when we need reflection, and when we need to recoup."

Ebata shares, "Sometimes as founders, it can be lonely and stressful. Burnout was a real risk at times for myself and other co-founders. In our sector, finding multi-year funding can be very challenging, and I don’t think we are alone. To truly advance efforts to improve quality of life, we desperately need upstream, preventative support so that problems can be addressed at the systems level where they typically start. Multi-year funding can sustain employee wellbeing, which ultimately sustains the work, and the potential for greater impact in community.”

Both the Oven and EOED are collectively stewarding a common purpose towards a vibrant ecology of ‘careholders’ as Ebata calls it. “To enable a world that has more cohesion and care, more healing and reconciliation, it is ideal for funding structures to be more adaptable to the problems and potential of the times we are in.”

Looking Forward

Mudge hopes that there are critics of their work.

“No matter what industry you are in, it’s important to hear and incorporate feedback, particularly from those who are historic to this community. We take the angle of holding any knowledge as sacred. Especially since we are so new, creative, and unique as an organization, it’s important for people to voice how they want our work shaped, and for us to hear that feedback and adapt and change.”

“We take the angle of holding any knowledge as sacred.”

- Tammy Mudge

There is no doubt that passion and care for what they do sustain their momentum. Through the friendships and frictions of their work, FSCO and EOED continue to inspire others at the community scale towards improving their own and their communities’ quality of life, with unconventional approaches to fostering greater social cohesion. Their initiatives are tangible and impactful examples of how centering people, connection, and inclusive engagement practices, have the power to unite more people in the shaping of a better future. 

Read more about Every One, Every Day, and the Front Street Community Oven by visiting their websites.