This is my second conscient conversation with social innovator and former CEO of McConnell Foundation, Stephen Huddart. The first took place on June 17, 2021 in Montréal, episode 58, and this second took place on September 24th, 2024 in Victoria BC. I’ve condensed all of this rich conversation down to my new format of 15 minutes – not an easy edit - so what you’ll hear highlights from our exchange about the vital role of art, social innovation, relations with indigenous peoples, the panarchy cycle, Stephen’s leadership role with the Victoria Forum (co-hosted with members of the Canadian Senate) and more.
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What if art holds the key to unlocking our collective future? This episode explores the intersection of art, innovation, and societal transformation, revealing how creative expression can guide us through crisis and towards revitalization.
Chapter Summary
00:00 The Power of the Arts
01:07 Revisiting Conversations
02:02 Trust and Community Engagement
04:22 The Victoria Forum Experience
06:10 Navigating Complex Challenges
07:30 Understanding Our Current Cycle
09:21 The Call to Action
11:17 The Role of the Arts in Social Change
13:08 Accelerating Transformation
Featured Quotes
Behind the Story
Stephen Huddart revisits the podcast to expand on previous conversations around social innovation, reflecting on the Victoria Forum 2024 and its focus on regenerative economies. The discussion navigates the complex challenges facing humanity, emphasizing the need for inclusivity and systemic change to address growing societal fractures. The power of art as a catalyst for inspiration and community is highlighted.
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00 - 00:00:57] Stephen Huddart
The arts have that capacity to be powerful broadcasters, conveyors of messages, invitations to celebration, reflection, storytelling, narrative building and so on. So there's a vital role here for the arts. But I think like the rest of society, frankly, whether it's the banking system or government or however, we're simply not doing it well enough that we could say we're satisfied with how much is happening and everything's going to be okay. It's not. If we just stopped now, chaos and worse are due. So it's not to say that we can hold up the arts and say, if only you were doing your job, everything would be fine. No, we all have, no matter what sector. There's so much to do.
[00:00:57 - 00:02:15] Claude Schryer
Episode 212. This is my second conversation with social innovator and former CEO of McConnell Foundation, Stephen Huddart. I've condensed all of this rich conversation down to this new format of 15 minutes. What you'll hear is highlights of our exchange about art, innovation relations, the Panarchy cycle and the Victoria Forum.
Well, earlier today we were in Thetis park and we did a sound walk. So we're going to hear bits of that as interjected in this conversation. And I'm very happy to have you on the program again because you were my guest on episode 58, which was through years ago. Of course, a lot of things have happened since then in our lives and in the world. And this is season six. So I'm focusing on arts and culture in times of crisis and collapse with hope that there will be revitalization in there eventually. But that's the focus. And I know we were just involved in a very large forum here in Victoria and I want to talk about that notion of trust because it's inherent, I think, to how we function as humans.
[00:02:18 - 00:04:20] Stephen Huddart
The moment at the Victoria Forum, at the end of a session on Planetary Health and a well-being Society, a big picture conversation about shifting healthcare and the health regime into alignment with environmental principles and priorities and seeing humanity as part of nature. Anyway, there was a very skillful, very talented group of speakers at the front of the room and a skillful facilitator who at the end of the session said he wanted everybody in the room. There were probably 50 people there to name one thing that they would do or wish for as a result of the conversation that had just taken place. And, you know, very powerful statements from the head of the Canadian Medical association and people who are deeply into thinking about, well, being economy. But it was the Shannon Waters, the medical health officer for the Cowichan Valley first nations health officer who said her wish was for every child in Canada to learn the indigenous word for water in the territory in which they lived. And I thought, I just felt this door open and light and water come into the room. It's like, yes, this is how we should be growing up. Knowing how other cultures in here for 10,000 years and more refer to some of these sacred gifts and our collective responsibility to steward. Let's start there. So it was a nice moment to.
[00:04:20 - 00:07:29] Stephen Huddart
Come into the present. Then I was invited to become an adjunct faculty member in the business school at the University of Victoria which is focused on sustainability. And so that gives me an opportunity to do guest lectures, to mentor students, to be on a couple of committees on social innovation and social finance. And it led to the opportunity to curate the regenerative economy theme of the Victoria Forum, which took place at the end of August and where we had between five and six hundred people here in person from across Canada and Europe and the States. And the interesting thing about the forum is that it's first of all, it's a hybrid organization or event. It's called co-hosted by the University of Victoria, co-hosted with members of the Senate of Canada. So we had about 15 senators here for the forum. And it's also a one of those places where all sectors of society, business, public, civil society and academia are engaged in deep conversations and exploration of the larger challenges facing humanity and what we can do about them. So there's an emphasis on so what? And on making sure that a wide range of perspectives is considered on any question. So we really strive to include people who don't normally come to conferences and speak. We were able to pay the travel costs for people, community members from across Canada, from underrepresented and marginalized groups and so on. And the idea was, the idea is that we don't have the social infrastructure that we need to successfully navigate the time we're in and the decade coming towards us. There's so many fractures and disruptions to the way things used to be done and our challenges are manifold and complex and growing and we don't seem to be able to catch up or get ahead of those using conventional means. So the forum set out to address that question of how do we introduce systemic change? And we looked at six separate domains and we also considered how the emerging field of systems innovation finance can enable resources to flow into problem domains in such a way as to catalyze transformation, to support seed level initiatives, to support capacity building and learning across sectors and across scales in order to achieve transformative impact.
[00:07:30 - 00:08:40] Stephen Huddart
One of the most useful ways that I found to think about where we are in the world and what's happening in the world now originates in the work of the resilience scholars and the use of the panarchy cycle, which describes transformations in natural and human systems. And it does a nice job of situating humanity in the same sort of cyclical dynamic of renewal and growth and creative destruction and so on. So it's a metaphor that I've used a lot in thinking about where are we now and what do we do about this? I think it's one of those devices for thinking and regarding humanity and nature and the states of transformation otherwise.
[00:08:42 - 00:08:45] Claude Schryer
And we're clearly in the destructive cycle.
[00:08:45 - 00:09:06] Stephen Huddart
Yeah, the so-called back loop where resources, the forest fire is the natural metaphor, but it's playing out with our institutions, with levels of civic trust in many ways.
[00:09:06 - 00:10:20] Stephen Huddart
When William Gibson said the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. There are so many places where new possibilities, new relationships and new experiments and demonstrations are alive and thriving. They're not always well connected and they're not always well resourced. But we have the intellectual, the financial, the technological, and one would hope, the human and spiritual resources with which to affect a beautiful transition. Why aren't we doing it? Well, this is not easy stuff to do. And yet if we take seriously our commitment to the life systems, to the planet of which we are stewards and, and to the well-being of future generations of human and non-human beings on this planet, we actually do.
It's a very compelling call to action. And I'm happy to say there are aspects of this in evidence and some very, very intelligent, committed, energetic people working on these things.
[00:10:21 - 00:10:59] Stephen Huddart
The challenge, the trap that sometimes occurs to people working on social change is that they never move out of that space. It's called the poverty trap. So, no single or no group of things gets sufficient attention, nourishment and so on to actually mature. And we see that in Canada when we talk about the proliferation of pilot projects that, you know, maybe not so much now, but there was a time when it seemed that everything was a pilot project, but nothing moved beyond that.
[00:10:59 - 00:11:28] Stephen Huddart
I think we need the arts to bring perspective, to penetrate shibboleths and sacred cows and things that we, we don't think can be challenged. The arts have done this many times in history and we need them more than ever. They're also, they also enable us to celebrate and to feel a sense of communion all of this.
[00:11:28 - 00:12:35] Stephen Huddart
And I think, you know, like you, I'm a little. I'm still waiting for the arts establishment for artists to be. I really don't want to sound arrogant or all-knowing here, God, but if we look backwards, even in just in Canada, to something like Le Refus Global, which was an artistic statement by a group of thoughtful and very creative artists as a challenge to the church and hegemony that existed then, it was productive of a shift in consciousness that led to the silent revolution, to a whole renewal of a society and the shedding of its colonial yoke into something much more equitable and a work in progress.
[00:12:36 - 00:12:39] Claude Schryer
But certainly, yeah, absolutely, substantial change.
[00:12:40 - 00:14:58] Stephen Huddart
There's a vital role for the arts at the local level to be contributing to dynamic civic culture. And the stories that come out of that, the ways that arts engage and inform and mobilize and inspire, especially young people these days, is really, I think, an extremely important role to be playing this time. You know, as we look ahead to the next, next year's forum, our overarching purpose is going to be to look at how we can accelerate transformation because we're simply not moving quickly enough on fulfilling the commitments to achieve the social. The sustainable development Goals, for example, on any number of metrics we're falling short, including on the critical one of achieving net zero by 2050 and the interim target of a 40 or 50% cut in emissions by 2030. We're not going to make it, so we can't. That's not good enough. Given the extraordinary position that we occupy in human history, with all of the past, you know, our ancestors and hundreds of generations leading up to this moment and all of the future, waiting to see what we're going to do. And look, we'll be looking back to see what we did. We cannot afford to sit back and say, well, we tried, but so what? But there's something, I think, happening right now in the culture that there an opening for new and different configurations of artists and others to be presenting, inviting, engaging people in deeper consideration, deliberative dialogue, active contemplation, provocative discussions and so on. Where respect is inherent, but where it's possible to see and hear and deeply hear others perspectives on a question. Do the arts have a role in all this? I think so.