Tim Adams doesn’t love terms like ‘vulnerable’ or ‘at-risk’ or ‘marginalised’ to describe the thousands of kids he’s worked with these past 13 years.

Adams' preferred term? Kids. Just kids.

The founder of the Edmonton Free Play program, originally called Free Footie, believes in the potential for all kids to overcome life challenges, with a bit of work and a lot of play.

Adams was a CBC journalist in 1987 when he was sent to an inner-city school to cover a story. He was watching some kids playing soccer and thinking of his own childhood, where his love of and commitment to multiple sports kept him out of trouble.

He got talking to the school principal about the kids and their needs … and one thing led to another. He left the school that day committed to coaching the kids in soccer, but then ran into multiple complexities, roadblocks and challenges that led him to found Free Footie.

That program branched out into numerous schools and involved teachers as volunteer coaches. Getting kids to and from games was a challenge, as was raising money for basics — a problem that remains to this day.

Free Footie became Free Play when the games expanded past soccer, into hockey, basketball and flag football and involved thousands of kids each year.

At its heart, Free Play was designed to keep the kids busy in after-school hours, when their parents are still at work and boredom can lead to unhealthy decisions. Free Play also gave overworked parents a free pass on after-school care.

But Adams thought the program could offer even more. Sport is supposed to teach life lessons. What if the lessons were built right into the games?

Free Play now has the ability and the coaches to teach everything from mental health practices to social and emotional skills, such as regulating emotions.

Free Play continues to evolve into a program that focuses on personal growth and development, with numerous school and community partners.

Yes, Adams is proud that Canadian soccer star Alphonso Davies went through the Free Footie program. But he thinks there’ll be thousands of kids who will graduate into being great people and great citizens, if not great athletes.

Free Play is social innovation at its finest, emerging and growing in Edmonton. Its founder, Tim Adams, is our guest on the LiftEd podcast with Erick Ambtman and Scott McKeen.

About Tim Adams

Tim Adams is the Founder and Executive Director of Free Play for Kids, a registered charity in Edmonton that harnesses the power of sport and play to teach social, emotional and mental health to 4,500 kids a year. Tim started the organization as a volunteer after finishing his shift as a journalist for CBC. Four years ago he flipped to make his volunteer life his full time job.

Peter Smyth has a novel suggestion for helping at-risk and high-risk youth.

Try patience and kindness instead.

Smyth, who worked 30-plus years for the Alberta Children's Services, says society’s punitive bias towards kids and teens is reflected in their government care.

Client behaviour is largely corrected through coercion or punishment, which only confirms everything the traumatised kid already felt about the world and the adults who run it.

Smyth, who sat down recently with Erick and Scott for the LiftEd Podcast, was prepared at one point to leave government service. He couldn’t reconcile his more empathetic philosophy with the bureaucracy’s.

A big point of contention for Smyth was limits on time he as a social worker could spend with a kid in his care. No one goes into social work to stare at a computer, he says.

The work, he says, is best done after building a respectful and trusting rapport. So Smyth fought the bureaucracy and, to his surprise, gained more freedom in how he ran his caseload.

The point, he says, is that at-risk and high-risk youth have seen little in the way of love or loyalty in their lives. Why wouldn’t they act out against the world?

So they get a new social worker — and another risk of being rejected or abandoned — and test the newbie to see if they’ll hang in.

He tells the story of one youth who kept testing Peter’s patience over months. Peter didn’t give up on her. He still hears from her occasionally today, though she’s now in her 30s.

Peter believes a broader understanding of childhood trauma is helping change attitudes. The same can be said for generational trauma. A majority of the kids in government care are indigenous and suffering the trickle-down effects from residential schools.

But there’s still a long way to go in changing societal attitudes. It’s like a rite of passage into middle age for people to express their distrust of the emerging generation and their disrespect.

Aristotle himself thought children irrational.

Mind you, he also said adults must be good role models and that a child’s education should be enjoyable.

Peter Smyth would agree on those last points.

“Punishing them (youth) into compliance is an odd way to do it,” he says.

About Peter Smyth

Peter has been a social worker with the Organization for the Prevention of Violence since February 2021, and was a consultant for OPV starting in 2016. Previously, Peter was the overseer of the High Risk Youth Initiative with Children’s Services Edmonton Region. He developed a practice framework and philosophy incorporating non-traditional intervention methods to better meet the needs of complex, troubled and street-involved youth population. Peter has written a book, book chapters and articles about issues confronting youth. He provides consultation, training and workshops on engaging and working with youth. Peter is a sessional instructor at the University of Calgary, Faculty of Social Work, and at the MacEwan University Social Work Program. The second edition of his book High Risk Youth: A Relationship-Based Practice Framework, will be released later this year.

Shalini Sinha is not here to make Canadians feel comfortable about our work to date fighting racism.

Progress? What progress?

But take note: Nor is she a flame-throwing activist. She makes a point of not blaming individuals or calling anyone racist. It’s complicated.

Sinha says, however, that the political polarisation of today makes discussing race more difficult. People are frustrated, angry and fearful. The mood is oppressive. BIPOC people are afraid to speak up or assert themselves.

“To me, we’re not at a healthy moment here,” says Sinha, an anti-racism advocate and educator, who lived half her life in Ireland and was part of the Irish delegation to the European Network Against Racism.

Sinha was the first chair of the City of Edmonton’s Anti-Racism Advisory Council. Sinha threw herself into the role, volunteering long hours and empowering other committee members to create a credible advisory voice for city council.

She even appeared before city council to demand remuneration for her committee members who were devoting considerable time and money to get the initiative off the ground.

She won that battle before the city council. But did she lose the war? The Anti-Racism Advisory Council was put on pause by the civil service several months back.

“We were not being loud and rebellious and divergent,” she says.

Still, she continues her anti-racism work. She’s writing a book on the subject. And she agreed to join Erick and Scott on the LiftEd Podcast to share her experience, values and optimism.

Racism, she says, is closely tied to colonialism. No one alive today is to blame for centuries old systems. In fact, most of us suffer under inequitable systems of power and dominion.

When we label individuals racist, she says, we miss the point and give a pass to historic power structures.

“I think everybody needs healing from this,” she says. “I talk about the joy of anti-racism. If racism is painful and violent and harmful, anti-racism must be connecting and loving and affectionate.

“It means we get to be side by side with each other in a human community.”

Even people of wealth and privilege lose under the old power systems, she argues.

“The more money you have the taller the walls or gates you live behind. What human aspires to live in that much fear – in that much isolation?

“The thing that surprises me the most is … that people really don’t understand how positive anti-racism is for everybody.”

About Shalini Sinha

Shalini Sinha has 25 years professional experience consulting in the area of anti-racism, gender, intersectionality and equity. In this time, she has learned to keep things simple, create practical steps and work to bring everyone along – that is, everyone who wants to come. She loves working with leaders who care about climate and social justice and want to create some form of transformational change in their organizations – no matter how small the first step or where it is they are starting from. Through her company, Inclusiv, Shalini supports leaders and organizations to develop an equity lens, strategy, education, policy and communication. She has an academic grounding, and currently teaches in Gender Studies at MacEwan University on topics such as feminism, intersectionality, antiracism and decolonization. Shalini chairs the City of Edmonton's Anti-Racism Advisory Committee, and is Chair of the Board of the Pride Centre of Edmonton. While she was born and grew up in Canada, Shalini has lived half her life in Ireland, and was a member of the Irish delegation to the European Union to help establish the European Network Against Racism. She was delighted to be asked as a ‘Change-Maker’ speaker when His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited Ireland, and to have delivered her TEDx Talk, ‘Are you Consciously Creating a Culture of Respect?’ She is a talented speaker, writer, academic, entrepreneur, consultant, single-mother, and 2SLGBTQIA+ person living with disability. She is currently writing a book on her approach and contribution to the antiracism conversation.

In essence, a city is just a hodgepodge of streets, buildings and green spaces where people live, work and play.

Cities are the seas we swim in. Yet only now are researchers studying the way urban environments impact on our moods and mental health.

One such researcher is former Edmontonian Dr. Robin Mazumder, an environmental neuroscientist whose research focuses on how urban stress affects us individually and collectively.

Mazumder, who grew up in B.C., worked for five years in Edmonton as an occupational therapist, where he noticed how disabled patients were cut off from participation in community, at least in part, by the physical environment.

He became prolific on social media and was one of the organisers of a famous, impromptu community snowball fight in the midst of a long Edmonton winter. That event — “magical” is how Mazumder describes it — drew hundreds of people outside on a winter day to play like children and raise money for charity.

Mazumder’s interest in community health and mental health led him to volunteer with the likes of Make Something Edmonton and the early days of EndPovertyEdmonton.

Mazumder was one of Avenue Magazine’s top 40 Under 40 in 2014. After leaving Edmonton to pursue his PhD, he was awarded the University of Waterloo’s President’s Community Impact Award in 2018.

Mazumder now speaks widely and regularly on how urban design can support well being. Issues of noise, safety and even public access are critical to health.

Does urban design cause or perpetuate poverty? Mazumder suspects it does.

Mazumder is currently doing postdoctoral research in the emerging discipline of neurourbanism, in Berlin, which is where the LiftEd Podcast reached him.

Cities like Berlin, he says, are rich in street life, which is an antidote to the dreary and unsafe moods created in too many urban areas.

“The streets are full of people because there are so many opportunities for people to sit and connect,” he says.

Edmonton might not yet have street life to match Berlin. But take heart.

“What makes Edmonton special to me,” says Mazumder, “is it’s the friendliest city I’ve ever lived in.”

About Dr. Robin Mazumder
Robin Mazumder is an environmental neuroscientist with a keen interest in how urban stress impacts individual, community, and societal wellbeing. His PhD research, funded by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, applied wearable technology in real and virtual settings to examine psychological and physiological responses to the urban environment. His research interests are informed by his clinical experience as a mental health occupational therapist working in the cores of Canadian cities, including Edmonton where he lived for five years. In addition to his research, Robin is an outspoken advocate for urban design that supports wellbeing and has given more than 30 keynotes internationally on the topic. He was named Top 40 Under 40 by Avenue Magazine in 2014, an "Edmontonian to Watch'' in 2015 by Metro Edmonton, and in 2018 was awarded the University of Waterloo’s President’s Community Impact Award in recognition of his leadership and advocacy. Robin is also passionate about science communication and has been interviewed by and written for major media publications, including the CBC, Huffington Post, Wired, and Vice. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technical University of Berlin doing research in the emerging discipline of Neurourbanism, and is signed with literary agency Cooke-McDermid writing a book for the general public on the implications of neurourbanism on pressing societal issues.
https://robinmazumder.com/

Anne Harvey’s passion is matchmaking. Mind you, not in the romantic sense.

Harvey, a “relationship-oriented leader,” began introducing Edmontonians to each other in 2012 when the City of Edmonton’s Abundant Community initiative launched.

The initiative was in response to growing reports of social isolation in modern cities; of people feeling disconnected from friends, neighbours and community.

Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone, first brought the issue to the spotlight in the early 2000s, revealing a stark decline in church attendance, volunteering and political engagement in North America. He used bowling — a rapid decrease in bowling leagues but an increase in individual bowlers — as a symbol of declining social connection.

Twenty years on, social isolation is now viewed as a quiet epidemic, as harmful to health as obesity or cigarette smoking. Humans are social creatures and need to feel seen and supported.

Thus, the City’s decision to work with communities to create opportunities for neighbours to join with neighbours for local causes or just fun. The Abundant Community initiative, says Harvey, gave people the vocabulary to talk about something they were already feeling — a loss of connection.

As Harvey notes, Edmonton was ripe for this kind of work, given its century-old community league system. In fact, it was Edmonton’s history with active neighbourhoods that inspired Harvey’s masters research.

Simply put, she wondered if connected neighbourhoods remained connected during the recent pandemic.

In our LiftEd podcast with Harvey, she talks about her research and the many benefits of living a connected life. We also talk about the causes of social isolation, including the rise of social media.

Harvey’s advice is for all of us to be more intentional in meeting our neighbours. A small block party, rather than a neighbourhood-wide event, offers a better chance to meet those who love close by.

And it’s those people who will check on your house when you’re on vacation, or pick up groceries when you’re sick. We all live better lives when we support each other, she says.

Harvey is now the Senior Director of School and Community Based Programs with E4C, a non-profit, anti-poverty organisation in Edmonton that serves more than 16,000 vulnerable people.

About Anne Harvey
Anne Harvey is a relationship-oriented leader, facilitator, writer, ESL instructor and strategic manager of programs, projects and events. She brings her years of experience in the public, private and nonprofit sectors to her current role on the executive leadership team of E4C as Senior Director of School and Community-Based Programs. E4C, a nonprofit organization in Edmonton, Alberta that serves over 16,000 vulnerable people, has a mission to change lives and grow communities with the ultimate vision of eliminating poverty in Edmonton. 

Anne recently completed a community-based research project as a requirement for the Degree of Master of Arts in Community Development from the University of Victoria. Her research explored neighbourhood networks as viable places to build social capital and community resilience. Applying a qualitative methodological approach, Anne’s research explored how involvement in neighbourhood networks affected people in Edmonton, Alberta during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her research included a focus on Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), a strengths-based approach, as an enabler of neighbourhood networks.

You could say this man needs no introduction.

Except Don Iveson was often improperly introduced as Don Ive-R-son, even during the years 2013-2021 when he served as Edmonton’s mayor. This odd, seemingly contagious malaprop never seemed to bother Iveson. He was so prepared for it that he locked down domain names for both Iveson and Iverson during his election campaigns.

He was first elected as a city councillor in 2007 at 28 years of age as a strong advocate for environmental and social causes.

As mayor he sought and won funding for the Valley Line LRT extension, which will eventually link Millwoods in the southeast to Lewis Farms in the far west. He also sponsored a new and ambitious initiative, EndPovertyEdmonton, which he co-chaired with Bishop Jane Alexander.

Iveson also worked with neighbouring municipal councils to forge a stronger capital region; at the national level, he did similar work for five years as chair of Canada’s Big City Mayors Caucus. In 2021, Don Iveson decided to pull out of civic politics and watched on as his friend Amarjeet Sohi took over as mayor.

It's been quiet on the Don Iveson front ever since, so we thought it was time to check in. Iveson agreed to sit down with Erick and Scott, to find out what he’s been up to.

To no surprise, what he’s been up to is a lot. He’s working part-time with the Co-Operators on mitigating the impacts of climate change. He accepted a position at the University of Toronto as a School Of Cities Canadian Urban Leader. He has launched a consultancy to advise on complex municipal issues; is a member of the Expert Panel on Adaptation at the Canadian Climate Institute; and board co-chair at the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.

The climate and housing issues must be tackled together, he argues. It's wrong, he says, to suggest more housing will only drive up carbon loads. The challenge is difficult but such conditions bring the best out of us and our talent for creativity and innovation, he says. Does he remain hopeful, in a world where facts seemingly matter not and our politics too often mirror schoolyard bully tactics?

Iveson says he is optimistic. Get people away from the furious noise. Sit down with them. Chat with them about how to deal with shared concerns. Then people can and do work together. “I still believe people are amazing in their own right.”

About Don Iveson
Don served as Edmonton’s 35th Mayor from 2013 to 2021 with a guiding leadership principle to make things better for the next generation. This long-term view is now embedded in: Edmonton’s smart-growth City Plan; City Council’s Energy Transition Strategy; and the continued work of End Poverty Edmonton.

Since retiring from City Hall, Don continues to live in Edmonton. He works part-time with Co-Operators as Executive Advisor for Climate Investment and Community Resilience. Don is also ramping up Civic Good, a public policy advisory practice working on climate, housing, complex governance and civic innovation projects with like-minded clients ranging from startups to governments. He has accepted an appointment as a School of Cities Canadian Urban Leader at the University of Toronto, is a member of the Expert Panel on Adaptation at the Canadian Climate Institute, and volunteers as Board Co-Chair of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.

As Mayor, Don’s political leadership extended to the national stage, serving as Chair of Canada’s Big City Mayors during an unprecedented rise in the prominence of cities in the national political landscape, including leading during the COVID crisis which hit municipalities especially hard. His advocacy helped to shape the National Housing Strategy and influence the Federal Government to commit to ending chronic homelessness nationwide — goals that cannot be achieved without robust partnerships with cities. He also served as an Honourary Witness to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and implemented the first trauma-informed all-staff Indigenous awareness and reconciliation training program at a major Canadian city. 

Welcome to the LiftEd Podcast, sponsored by EndPovertyEdmonton and hosted by its executive director Erick Ambtman, along with former city councillor Scott McKeen.

We’re hoping the twice-monthly podcast will live up to its name, LiftEd, by elevating many of Edmonton’s most challenging social issues into the public consciousness.

The LiftEd Podcast will invite opinion leaders and subject matter experts to discuss topics and ideas around social impact. How can we make our communities healthier for all?

How can we tackle haunting issues like poverty, racism, affordable housing, income disparity and homelessness?

Our hope is to be non-partisan and bring optimism to the table when discussing some of society’s biggest social problems. The last thing any of us need right now is more doom, gloom and polarisation.

Both Erick and Scott are newbies to podcasting, but bring years of prior experience to these discussions.

Erick holds degrees in Economics from the University of Manitoba and the London School of Economics. He worked as the Executive Director of Aboriginal Friendship Centres in Calgary, Rocky Mountain House, Red Deer and Fort McMurray. He also ran the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers before joining EndPovertyEdmonton.

Scott is a career journalist, who worked 24 years at The Edmonton Journal, covering everything from environmental and social issues to civic politics. In 2013 he was elected to city council where he served until 2021 representing Ward 6, the greater downtown.