The Learning Zone (Pre-Departure Training)

I’m not entirely sure what I expected of my Pre-Departure Training in Toronto. I think that I wanted a nicely packaged toolkit on how to be a successful development worker, or something along that lines. However, that was not what the three days were about. We spent time reflecting on what brought us to this role and exploring our hopes, fears and expectations of our placement. We explored our learning styles and personality types, and worked on building relationships. We read, discussed and analyzed and re-analyzed and discussed some more several development case studies. We had a session to explore the root causes of poverty and to further develop our “systems” thinking approach. We also explored the concept of Participatory Rural Appraisal methods.

After learning about PRA, we were given an assignment to 1) help us put our new understanding to action, and 2) push is into our learning zone, bordering on the danger zone.

The theory is that you learn better when outside of your comfort zone (the green circle), and by giving us a challenging assignment, which would likely border on our danger zone (ultimate level of discomfort), our green zone would increase, thereby making us more effective development workers in a foreign country. And so we were given the question: “Why are people homeless in Toronto?”, a team and an hour and half to find the answer. To help those who are not familiar with Toronto, our facilitator suggested some areas which may be useful for our “research”: “Queen and Bathurst”, “Queen between Jarvis and Parliament” … areas I actively avoided while living in Toronto. My partner and I decided we wanted to talk to a few homeless people, but wanted to do so in the security of a shelter. We pulled out my phone and asked Mr. Google for the location of some shelters in downtown Toronto. I quickly chose The Covenant House, because I felt I might be more comfortable with youth than with potentially old men. As we talked about our approach I realized that I had an assumption that many people in Toronto were homeless because they chose to be. I’m not sure where this came from, perhaps previous conversations or reports I’d read. Part of this assignment was to challenge our assumptions, and so we decided we should just start talking to some of the homeless we passed, if only to at least get our heads wrapped around this assignment and help us develop a better approach. And so we approached one gentleman, who answered our questions, but primarily served as a guinea pig for our question asking abilities.

The second person was a woman from El Salvador, Anna. She had lived in Montreal before coming to Toronto, did not have any friends or family in Toronto, and considered the shelters her home. We decided that an alternative to asking our interviewees why they were still on the street or didn’t get a job, that we would ask them “If you could change one thing about Toronto to help yourself, what would it be?” Anna didn’t want to change anything. She was happy, and so we thanked her for her time.

We turned around and saw a hand holding a Tim Horton’s cup poking out from a mailbox across the street, so we darted across Yonge Street to reach him. Ahmed was from Morocco, and had spent sometime living in Ottawa, Hull and Montreal, in between various stints in Toronto. As he switched back and forth between French and English, we learned that he had once held a job, but because of his health, he could no longer work, and as a result has found himself on the street. When asked “If you could change one thing about Toronto to help yourself, what would it be?” he responded that he’s never seen a social program or institution that was effective, rather, if he wanted to change his situation, he needed to change himself.

Carissa and I went on to speak to two police officers, and then started randomly polling individuals in and around the Eaton’s Centre as to what they thought was the primary reason individuals ended up on the streets in Toronto. The contrast in the answers was interesting, the police officers suggested that the primary reasons for homelessness were addictions, mental illness, and that people remained in this state because in Toronto, it was very easy to. They shared that people in Toronto were often too generous and protective of the homeless, which made their job as a law enforcement officer more difficult. The top reasons cited by the average public were scarcity of well-paying jobs, the high cost of living and lack of affordable housing.

I know we didn't answer the question posed to us. Can you really understand anything in an hour and a half? But, I will say that this exercise helped emphasize the importance of humility, and helped to bring us together as a group of volunteers.