Core Session: Trust & Polarization - A Simulation

Pretend you’re a part of the Canadian Student Alliance. You’re on a mission to address the fact that some international students are being turned away from food banks, and to do that you need to figure out which of the 5 stakeholders you could partner with to help you with your position:

• Associations of Food Banks Canada
• Consortium of Ontario Universities and Colleges?
• Government
• Coalition of Big Grocers
• Non-Profits United

As a member of the Canadian Student Alliance, you ask yourself:

• Who’s your strongest ally?
• Who has your best intentions in mind??
• Who is going to make sure students' rights are maintained??

That’s the situation or should I say, simulation,? I and some of my fellows found ourselves in (shout out my counterparts to Erica Opoku , Phylicia Davis-Wesseling and Rochelle Reid ).

As our first #DiverseCityFellows Core Session from CivicAction , we took part in a simulation based on a real story in our city (Article Here) . As fellows, we were each assigned 1 of the stakeholders that I mentioned above and had to work as a group (in my case the Canadian Student Alliance), to determine our position and negotiate our way with potential allies.

I can’t speak for the other fellows, but what I experienced and witnessed? in this short, high-intensity phase of negotiation was:?

• A feeling of powerlessness:? As students, a lot of positions and arguments were for the future: We will be contributors to the future economy as consumers and workers. We can be future voters for governments. We are the future marketing potential for the post-secondary institution we are attending. These arguments for what we bring for the future just don’t resonate with the stakeholder group we are working with because they want actions and results now, not in the future.
• Our societal and economic structures enable certain power dynamics. For example, during our simulation, it became obvious that The Coalition of Big Grocers was dripping with power and driven by profit, and the fellows who played them, embodied their power with certainty.?As much as we were unsatisfied with their proposals, and constant push for asking for time, it was hard not to succumb to their will.
• Intuitive and instinctual partnerships formed;? some partnerships naturally formed because of a specific stakeholder need. For example,? the Canadian Student Alliance needed the Consortium of Ontario Universities and Colleges. The food banks and non-profits, or everyone wanted a piece of the government.? Some relationships formed due to the dependency that one stakeholder had on another, or they realized the power dynamic one stakeholder held.

I’ve been through my fair share of simulations and it never fails to surprise me how a time-boxed simulation can mimic life and how negotiations may take place. We may not be experts in the role we were assigned, but it didn’t take us long to take the points we were given and run with them.

At the end of the day, the simulation was a learning opportunity.?

It was an opportunity to build and consider perspectives, especially when we are asked to put on a specific hat or position we don’t typically take on, or don’t know about. It was also a chance to challenge how we would approach the situation and how you would communicate your position.?

Ultimately, as much as art imitated life, and it was uncomfortable, frustrating and intense, I can’t help but think that we weren’t creative. If we truly mimicked how negotiations would happen in real life, then also, in a way we may have learned nothing.

As part of the DiverseCity Fellows, a point that has been driven home is that cross-collaboration between unlikely partners would be powerful.?

• So why didn’t we as the Canadian Student Alliance approach the Coalition of Grocers?
• Why didn’t we ask them for employment opportunities allocated to International Students??
• Why didn’t we ask for specific student discounts??
• Why didn’t we ask the grocers to lobby the government to take away the 20 hours a week working limit on International students??

Sure, some of these ideas will face backlash and nay-sayers, they may make absolutely no sense, or maybe they won’t work. However, the problems of today call for creative and out-there solutions that go against these presumed and existing power dynamics. It means we need unlikely partnerships, we need ideas that have been tested in other places or never been tried before to challenge the perceived power structures without constantly enabling them.?

After this first Core Session, I’m eating some serious food for thought. I hope we have more simulations in the future, they are great for building perspective, but I hope I get the opportunity to be more creative and try things that may not happen in the “real world”.

#DiverseCityWithBG

Credit to the Toronto Star for the photo.