By: Rayna Preston
As I write this, the season is changing before my eyes; the days have grown longer, sunnier and warmer here in Halifax. The rains are falling, the trees and gardens are budding and the animal world around us has awakened this past week. The peepers have started to sing, the birds are returning from their overwinter migration, and insects are popping up everywhere — including those pesky ticks; time for those routine checks again. Spring is fully in the air!
This time of year always brings up a range of feelings in me. Spring’s onset seems to conjure a sense of hope, possibilities, abundance, gratitude, and new beginnings; all things the world could use a little more of these days. And it’s on that note that we wanted to hop on here and share some new beginnings that are sprouting at NS GovLab.
Our team is excited to share that we recently moved from the Department of Seniors and Long-Term Care to the newly created Department of Advanced Education in January 2022. It’s been an exciting few months for us and the move has sparked significant changes for our team and the Lab’s focus. We are busy shifting, learning and developing new relationships as we come to understand more deeply what Nova Scotia’s higher education system does, how it functions, how it’s funded and what work is already underway in this innovation ecosystem.
As a new Department, there has also been significant change within Advanced Education. The Department has recently released a new Business Plan and the Lab’s move has added new resources to support the Department’s ongoing innovation efforts. As we continue to figure out all of the specifics and our new role, we do know that the Lab will be stepping up to support the Department’s new strategic goals around advancing research and innovation. Post-secondary sector innovation plays a significant role in Nova Scotia’s Advanced Education 2022–2023 Business Plan and our team has been asked to collaborate with our partners to develop an innovation framework that will guide and balance the Department’s innovation portfolio across multiple types of innovation.
We have also been asked to work on enhancing institutional, organizational and ecosystem learning from innovation and most importantly, to ensure the use of intersectional lenses, anti-oppressive practices and decolonial approaches in the development and delivery of innovation initiatives and programs across the post-secondary sector. Part of this work will involve getting a deeper understanding of the breadth, depth, equity and inclusiveness of Advanced Education’s direct innovation investments at post-secondary institutions, the NS Sandbox program and internal Department operations and making recommendations to senior leadership about how best to implement and steward a more balanced innovation approach.
Why Move? Why Now? What about your focus on population aging?
Over the past five years, we have learned so much from working in the space of population aging and engaging in decolonial and anti-racist practice work. We have tested out new ideas, we’ve helped build capacity for social innovation, prototyping, systems thinking, aging population issues and we have certainly failed forward along the way. We have always remained focused on learning, reflection and using our past experience to inform our future direction; vowing to make new mistakes but not repeat those of the past.
After five years with the Department of Seniors, the Lab team and others reflected on the parts of our work that have had the most impact and may arguably be most needed right now in the public sector and public institutions; and it has been our unique approach to building capacity for decolonial and anti-racist practice in social innovation, for engaging community as co-creators and in redirecting attention, resources and working towards true inclusion with groups who have traditionally been excluded from policy making, government and innovation spaces. While NS GovLab started with a somewhat narrow focus on population aging, we learned quickly how interconnected ageism and other forms of oppression are. We recognized that without addressing other forms of oppression in our efforts and working to apply an intersectional lens in our innovation portfolio, we were most likely helping sustain status quo, recreating old problems and not advancing the types of transformative systems change that is really needed.
With this move we saw an opportunity to bring this thinking, practice and decolonial approaches to a broader innovation ecosystem. We also are mindful that colonization, racism, ageism, ableism and other forms of oppression have been and continue to be nurtured, reproduced and sustained within institutions of learning and higher education; and this needs to change. There is no doubt about the critical connection between education, Nova Scotia’s commitments to Truth and Reconciliation, and the role that institutions of higher education must play in advancing decolonization/anti-racist practice in this province.
So, we put forward the request to shift our focus, our work and homebase. To come to Advanced Education, a Department that holds a mandate for supporting higher education institutions, the Province’s research agenda, where we might be able to focus and work with partners who are trying to address historical wrongs; to indigenize campuses; to decolonize our ways of being, hearts and minds; to remove barriers to participation in post-secondary education and employment; and ultimately, to ensure the types of innovation we engage in and fund as a public sector body, benefit and connect us to this earth, its people around the world, and the next seven generations of human and non-human life.
While we leave the Department of Seniors and Long-Term Care, we have not lost our commitment to anti-ageism or work that supports our aging population in Nova Scotia. Population aging impacts us all; every sector in our economy and the future success and sustainability of our province. Many of the challenges facing Advanced Education are deeply rooted and entangled with the challenges that come from an aging population — current and future skilled worker shortages, mounting health and care needs, and the importance of Elder to youth mentorship in supporting successful student transitions. We hope you will continue to follow our journey as we enter this next season of NS GovLab, and take up work with new partners, in new sectors and in support of new — but not necessarily less difficult — challenges.
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NS GovLab was originally established in the fall of 2017 as an action of SHIFT: Nova Scotia’s Action Plan for an Aging Population. Prior to its move to Advanced Education in January 2022, the purpose of the Lab was to use social innovation theories and methodologies to identify systemic challenges and policy barriers related to an aging population. Since its relocation the Lab’s mandate has shifted to supporting the development a new mission, vision and goals for the innovation portfolio at Advanced Education while working to develop and deepen its partnerships focused on decolonial, anti-racist, anti-ageist and anti-ableist practices/approaches.
If you are interested, you can read more about NS GovLab’s history, the approaches we have been working with and the evolution in the work undertaken with the Department of Seniors and Long Term Care from 2017–2021 on our Twitter, Medium Blog, YouTube channel and via our Sourcebook.
