1.11: Sporting: Setting up to support winning, delight, and formative goodness

In episode eleven, Tim and Tuesday deconstruct the change journey of a piece of work that rings bells across the spectrum. Using sport as a container, what can the rest of us learn about breaking through to ‘win’?

1.11 — SHOW NOTES

Tues: This piece of work represents an intersection between our growing up, our current physical activity, and our work.Tim and Tues reflect on their own connection to sport as a coping and processing mechanism, identity, and pathway out of poverty for many young people.Tues: In this piece of work with Sport Nova Scotia (‘sport for social change’), we share the desire of helping more people experience the gift of sport—confidence and courage. In this collaboration, we’re figuring out how to re-engineer the system so more people can experience this.Tim: How can the culture of sport be more accessible? How can we shift the economy and structure of it in terms of who it prioritizes (colour, race, ethnicity, how long your family has been in the province, who they know)? Accessibility is huge.Tues: It’s a question common to all people seeking to collaborate for all kinds of change, beyond just sport: how much of our efforts simply make tweaks within a broken system? What’s stopping us from creating a completely new and equitable system from the ground up? As change facilitators, we work inside this tension all the time.Tim: Keeping the doors open on the dominant system buys us time to create the new. Part of our hypothesis is that we need people who are helping the old system stay open, and help it die and help to detoxify it as much as we need people meeting the new. These are all change leadership roles.Tues: Let’s be intentional because some of our efforts will be towards the old system. Our children, adults and seniors are in that old system now. Also, only choosing to look toward the new can leave a lot of people behind.

POEM: “Dark Testament: Verse 8” by Pauli Murray

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at last . . .

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

SONG: “In My View” by Young Fathers

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Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 30:36

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: Source

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