Laura Mannix is the Director of Community Development at DIVERSEcity Community Resources Society.

I spoke with Laura to talk about her work bringing social innovation culture into her organization, as well as how DIVERSECity has been able to pivot remotely. We talk about what all of that has meant for the kind of community work that they do and how it relates to newcomer and community engagement as well.

I find her journey towards innovation and how she incorporated it into her work really interesting and I think you’ll find her insights and experiences incredibly valuable.

Some themes from our conversation:

* social innovation has to be focused on creating more more equitable communities and we need to dive into what the role of settlement is around that. That requires time and space to do that, have time for reflection, look at how social innovation values align with the sector’s, and really become equipped to think about the challenges of settlement, of our frameworks and the the entirety of what settlement is, and its impacts.* bringing social innovation into an immigrant and refugee-serving sector agency isn’t a “copy and paste” exercise. It’s a journey that values both new ideas as well as the experiences, ideas, approaches, and work that agency staff, newcomers, and communities bring.* Transforming your organization requires leadership that buys into that transformation, and gives the agency the space to do the work, prioritizing mentorship, capacity building and pathways.* Doing all of this means putting in the actual structures at a team level to facilitate those discussions in a systematic consistent way, so it just becomes second nature, and staff don’t feel threatened if they’re critical and open in their feedback.* The future of settlement work is blended. After this experience pivoting to remote work, there’s no going back. But there needs to be time and space to really look at what that means for structure, staffing, community, service, and technology infrastructure. Settlement work is always relationship-based work, and we cannot lose that. We also need to keep power, access, and vulnerability top of mind as well: “I have multiple your conversations and keep in touch with colleagues of mine that are discussing this. How do we sustain this at the moment because we know that this has disproportionately affected racialized folks and folks who work at our organizations and and, of course, the community members that we support. And so how do we then support our our teams through that and then expect them to continue to support community members through that? We’re still figuring it out.”

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript using Otter.ai. The transcript has not been edited. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for listening to the audio.

0:00My name is Laura Mannix and I’m the Director of Community Development at diversity community resources society. And my pronouns are she her hers, and our work takes place on the ancestral traditional and unceded territories of the semi Amr katze katzie, kotlin, kotlin and musk come to us in First Nations and which is now referred to as Siri, Langley and delta. It’s a quieter right wide community. And I have the privilege of working with migrant communities. And my team provides support services that range from what what a settlement services to specialized, specialized services for more multiperiod folks that arrived,