Susan Moore - Social Change Advocate

Welcome Back to Heart Stormings!

On today's episode, I will be having a conversation with Susan Moore, graduate of the Royal Roads University, lifelong social change advocate and all around amazing human being!

Susan will share with us her story of how and why she has dedicated her career to supporting marginalized groups in housing and health care.  Susan also graciously shares her story of what it was like to come out to her parents and her community after she had discovered her true sexual identity in early adulthood.  Although Canada has made some progress in supporting LGBTQ rights, back in the 1990's it was not an easy road to navigate and Susan shares her story with humour and grace.

My sincere apologies for the sound quality of Susan't audio and the occasional straining in our voices in this podcast as we had to deal with severe smoke and wifi connection issues due the wildfires in British Columbia.   However, I think you'll agree that Susan's messages are too important not to share.

Transcript

 What I ask everybody, and I'm sure you've heard by now, or if you've heard any of my podcasts, the first thing I ask is, do you remember what you wanted to be as a little girl, and are you doing that now? 

I have a vague recollection of believing I wanted to be a teacher, specifically being a teacher in junior high or high school. Did I do that?   No, I didn't do that, and I certainly don't do that now. But I had a slight variation of that when I was teaching English in Mexico. I taught English in Mexico City for five years. I think that was probably the closest I came. Although when I moved back to Canada, I was running some international programs where I was also teaching English to younger students who were still in high school and teaching Spanish to adults. 

Wow, you're too busy going to school yourself, I understand. So you went back and got your Rhodes Scholarship? 

Yeah, I went to Royal Roads University and I did a majors in Interdisciplinary Studies. I completed that in 2019, so it was a recent degree.  I went back as a mature learner, for sure, but I did that out of wanting to actually just make a difference in the career I was doing.  I was working in the nonprofit sector at that point and had been working on the front lines with vulnerable seniors and realized after a few years that.   I'm not getting invited to any of the decision making tables to affect policy changes or really create solutions to the continuous and growing challenges we were seeing and that I was also not meant to be working on the front lines burned out big time after about years.   I'm not capable of working on the front lines where can I still have an impact?   And that was going back looking at how you work with sustainable community development how do you affect change at a policy level and then also really being able to build on asset based community development principles and practices.  So rather than having to reinvent the wheel all the time, how do you support that collaboration across sectors when working with the same population or same demographics and really capitalize on the subject matter expertise that exist within different sectors and the resources as well. So by working together we can be stronger in community. Amazing. You're still making a difference but you're actually part of the policy making machine. I don't know if I'm making a difference but I think probably having had that frontline experience at the very least what I can do is at an institutional level or an organizational level ensure that those who are continuing to work on the front lines have support because that was something that I didn't have.   It's something that's consistent throughout the nonprofit sector where nonprofits are usually under resourced and a lot of those resources translate into low salaries for the frontline workers, a lack of benefits and supports in place precarious employment. And, yeah, I'm a firm believer that the way the nonprofit sector is established right now and with the continuous downloading from specialized sectors like health or mental health and substance use onto the nonprofit sector housing as well, that we're creating a whole demographic of traumatized individuals who cannot access the support that they need to be well to maintain their health and their capacity to engage with. 

That takes a special heart to actually be willing to step in and help, especially the vulnerable population, the seniors dealing with illness and death on a daily basis.   And they're not being paid properly, they're not being treated properly, they don't have the resources.   I can only imagine what it was like during the endemic and for them to still be doing that job.   They are just amazing human beings. 

I think a lot of what I'm seeing now having gone from frontline work into working in a nonprofit housing organization and now working with a health authority, what I've seen more of now is that polarization of beliefs as well.  There's a whole faction of people who don't believe that  COVID was an issue that vaccinations are important.  The decisions made by the health authority to keep all populations safe and healthy, there's a lot of misinformation. And what's happening now after the major impact of the pandemic is that you still have these groups that are punching up at anything that they don't like.   So we're seeing a lot more targeted harassment of frontline workers in the health sector in not for profit housing.  The NIMBYism, the not in my backyard. You can't put social housing in my community.   They're misinformed or they simply don't care.   Who are the people that move into social housing?   Well, they must be drug addicts and mentally ill and they're horrible people and there's going to be crime and blah, blah, blah. In reality,  the majority of people that we housed and I worked for one of the largest not for profit housing providers in the city of Vancouver.   The majority of our tenants were seniors. And seniors are the fastest growing population. Unhoused people. I think the last homeless count identified, about 24% of the homeless population were seniors. And these are folks who are not necessarily aging into homelessness aging. They have experience living on the street. These are folks who are living on fixed income. The province of 50% of seniors live on $26,000 a year or less.   

That's below poverty level, is it not? Pretty close to it. 

I think it depends on what property you look at and how it's calculated.   But when you average sort of rent for a bachelor's suite at a market rate is over 2000, that's 500 more than what people are bringing home in a month.  They're becoming homeless because of poverty.   They're living on fixed incomes.   The majority are women. And a lot of these folks are people who worked their whole lives. They put money away, they saved for their retirement.  They did everything right and they outlived their savings and they used their savings to offset the increased cost of living.  I could go on and on about, 

No, please do. Because it is so important.   I don't think people realize ...........normally a pandemic or a world catastrophe, when people come out of it, they come out kinder, gentler, more supportive.  It didn't happen this time.   And it's sickening.   It just makes my stomach turn every time I see somebody say something like that about social housing or about senior citizens.  This could happen to you.  To be so selfish and self serve......argh!   You moved from Alberta to BC?

It would have been about 97, 98, something like that. And moving back to Alberta from Mexico and landing in Delburn, Alberta, that time. 750 people in the village.   I moved with my girlfriend and so we were the lesbians living in the hardware store on the corner of Main Street. Across from the Co-op.   And at that time, there had just been a decision made by the court to enshrine the rights of the LGBTQ population in the human rights legislation and to articulate it.   If you're not named, you're not protected.   Some people assume you are, but you don't have the same access to being able to remedy any human rights violations.   As someone who was working for a public college at that time, I had to stay so far in the closet that it had a negative impact on how I was perceived in the workplace.   I was challenged about being too secretive, too close.  And then when I did start to share little bit about my life, I lost my job.  

What? 

Yeah. So I can't say it was only because I was starting to come out. Yeah.  But it had an impact.  I was told to reapply for my position, was interviewed, and did not get it. 

Run that by me again.  They made you apply for the position you already had and you didn't get it?   Did they reorg you out of your position?   Is that how that worked? 

I was in a full time contract. I had held it for a year and a half. 

Yeah, but they wanted to hire permanent?  And that's why you had to apply for it?

No, it's still contract. 

That just makes me mad!    So feel free to say no if you don't want to talk about it, but I know you weren't open about your sexuality in high school.   I never heard the word gay or lesbian out of your mouth in high school.   All that time, we hung out at the smoke doors.   haha yeah, we weren't smoking.   We were just hanging out because our friends were out there.   Or at least I wasn't  smoking, I was on the basketball team, so I couldn't smoke.   But I found the people at the smoke doors were more fun than the people that jocks that hung out the gym.   Anyways, zero judgment. I was just shocked because you and I never had that conversation.  Not that it was an open conversation to be had back then.   It was a very different world back then. 

I don't think I fully realized it then.  I was in my early twenty s I was 20 or 21 the 1st time I kissed a girl and I dated men.  I tried that and I like to think of that as being a faze.   haha

 Well, like I said, the 80s was a totally different world. We didn't talk about those things and that could be why it took you a little bit before, you realized. 

And I think, too, I think sexual orientation is really more of a pendulum rather than a linear experience.    It's not black, white,  everybody's straight until they're not.   That sort of thing.   But I think if you think of it as a pendulum swing with very straight on one side and very gay on the other, I sort of land more on the gay to straight sort of bottom part of the pendulum swing.  A little bit closer to bi, but definitely on the women oriented side. 

You know what?  I don't like labels. I really don't.  Love is love. I've never ever had judgment.   I was the most naive person on the planet when I graduated from high school.  I've never ever understood trying to class people based on who they are as human beings.   I've never understood that.  Really irritates me when I hear people put down anybody for any reason other than the fact that they're absolute jerks.  You could put someone down if they're being a jerk to somebody else all day long, but not for who they are or what they look like or who they love.   I've never understood that. 

I think I was very fortunate in that I never fit. I never fit with any group.   So I sort of always on the outskirts of multiple social groups and that gave me the opportunity to build friends or friendships, relationship with people who were different cultures, different religions, different colour, different sexual orientation, gender, presentation, all of that.   And different ages as well.   I didn't have a lot of close friends who were my age.   I tended to gravitate towards older people.   Or people who were older than I was. And I think I was really fortunate that way.   Though not immune 

Growing up, we lived in our own little bubbles, right?  Our own little shell of a reality that our parents raised us in until we become adults and realize there's other things going on in the world.   And maybe our parents weren't necessarily 100% right.   So, were your parents accepting when you came out?   Were they supportive?   Sorry, please tell me to back off if I'm being too pushy.   I'm just very curious 

I was a young adult when I came out, when I even came out to myself. And the first person in my family that I came out to was my sister, because she kept calling me a les as trying to insult me.   So I finally she said, yeah, I am.   You're not hurting my feelings. 

Yeah, shut her up. 

She said, I'm dating a girl. 

Oh, your sister is, too?

 That was a phase for her. She just happened to have a crush.   She was enamoured with a friend of hers, and so it was an experiment. She tried it.   She didn't like it.   It wasn't for her.   I tried it.   I liked it.   That's where I stayed.  haha So I told my sister, I wasn't living home at that time.   And my mom and my sister and I were in my mom's car, and mom was dropping me off where I was living, one of those big old houses that there were five women renting.   It was all lesbians and really artistic, musical, eclectic group of women.   And again, one of the groups that I didn't quite fit in with either, always on the outskirts.   Anyways, mom was dropping me off, and I thought, okay, now's the perfect time   I'll come out.   And so I stole a friend's coming out story, which was talking about canned peas and how you know how when you grow up, you got served canned peas, and canned peas are fine.   You ate the canned peas because those were the only peas you knew, and everybody else is eating the canned peas, so you must have to eat the canned peas.   And then one day, somebody gives you fresh peas, and you can never go back to the canned peas. And mom, I'm gay. 

hahahahaha

I don't remember any discussion after that, but I did hear from my sister that they went home and Mum called my dad.   They've been divorced forever.   Called my dad, gave him shit about you weren't involved enough in your daughter's life. 

Yeah, it's his fault. 

He said, You didn't realize that?

I'm surprised she didn't call him Can Peas.  haha

I think my dad knew about me before I knew about me. 

Oh, that's funny.  Can Peas.  Love it. 

It's been, I mean. I can't fault my Mom, like I can give you an example. When Sarah and I were going to get married and I called my mom and said that we were getting married, we had just bought our first place together, and her first question was, is it legal?   

Oh boy...

How many other people have that type of response from family? 

It's that generation, they don't know.   My mom would be equally judgmental.   I try to remind myself that their parents lived through two world wars and a depression, and so it was purely survival mode from day one when our parents came around.   And so they were never taught really compassion.   They were really not taught more than the husband and wife role.   Even in school, we had one home economics course, but the wives had to learn how to cook and clean. So I have to remind myself that that ignorance comes from her upbringing.   And as much as she tries to be forward thinking, it's still at the back of her mind everything that she grew up with.   Yeah. I'm sorry.   After all these years, your mom still isn't quite she's accepting, but she's still making the comments here and there. 

I think you raised a really good point in terms of our parents come from a generation where they were raised by people who went through world wars, the depression, like you said, and they were raised by young adults, very young, experienced some significantly traumatic experiences.   I think of my mom's dad who went to Europe for the Second World War.   He volunteered as soon as the war broke out.   And he was in the Royal Air Force and he was in London during the Blitz, and he was in a building that was bombed, and he was in there with his best friend from Banff.   That's where they were born and raised.   And yeah, the building was bombed and it collapsed, and my grandfather's back was broken.   He was the only survivor.   He was buried. For a really long time.   I don't know if it was many, many hours or days, but he had to listen to his best friend dying, and he came back. 1s The PTSD, which wasn't named PTSD at that time, which wasn't recognized, it wasn't acknowledged.   After World War I. It was shell shock.   But again, how was it treated, how was it supported?    And he went through major depressive episodes, where, for days on end, my mom and her three sisters would come home from school, and Grandma would say, you have to be very quiet.   Grandpa's in bed.   He has a headache.   Your dad is in bed.   My grandpa and on my dad's side, my grandpa, during the Depression, his father died and he had to leave school at 13 or 14 to go to work to support his family.   And then he went to war, and he was in infantry, and he was in the war for the full duration on the ground.   And I remember some of the stories that he would tell after dinner, but he would tell them in a way that they really funny.   Funny for us as children, not realizing the full trauma of what was being experienced.   Like going through a field in a tank, and the person driving the tank has its head up out of the tank.   And they went through trip wires, and the driver was decapitated, the head rolled back into the tank, freaked out, jumped out of the tank.   They were being followed. He was shot in the ass, managed to get back up in the tank.   And as a kid, as my grandpa's telling it, it's funny.    Now as an adult, looking back on it, it's like, that's horrifying.    How do you witness that and be okay?   And as I've spoken to my auntie since, who had a very different relationship with her parents, she explained that that was not the way he was with his children.   He came back to Canada after the war.   His son, my dad, had been born and was about six years old when he came back.   He's traumatized all this PTSD, and he's got this six year old boy who's taking all the attention away from him.   And my dad ended up being sent away.   He was sent to the grandparents farm. I guess he was gone for about a year.   And my grandfather was a very angry, very volatile person while they were growing up.   My aunt was born after that.   But my dad had this experience with a father who couldn't demonstrate love, that never in their lifetime together did they ever say I love you to each other. Never. And my dad witnessed his best friend die when he was eight or nine years old. They were riding bikes, and his best friend was run over by a dump truck. Oh, my gosh. And so looking at who my dad has been in the world, I can appreciate it now as an adult, having a better understanding of trauma and how it affects how we engage with the world, whether or not we're able to love how we're able to love people or demonstrate it?   How quick to rage are we versus how balanced we can be during crisis.   And where does our resiliency live?   And is it in just fighting, fighting, fighting?   Or is it in being able to collaborate, negotiate peace, accept what is we're complex beings, and we live in a complex world, and life is not fair, and intersectionality comes in everywhere.   For people to be who they are.   

Exactly

How we show up is never going to be our best selves every all the time. 

What? I'm perfect.  hahaha  I'm kidding. I am far from perfect. You raise a really good point, because the grandparents were very young when they had my parents.   My parents were very young when they had us.   We had the luxury of not dealing with the depression or any world wars.  We had a few recessions, but it wasn't the same.   So we had the luxury of exploring outside of the gender norms, outside of the norms of relationships, the norms of what you do with your career.   I think it gets better and better with generations.  I'd like to say that us Gen Xers made the millennials lives much easier.  That's why they have much more healthy attitude.   What's in it for me? Whereas we were always people pleasers, first parent, pleasers, then people pleasers.   It was just always making sure we don't offend anybody. Totally different attitude. 

Yeah. I wonder, I think if you were to ask, what is the shitstorm we've rained down on the younger generation?   The environment would be a top one. 

Oh, totally. 

Rising cost of living and consumerism. Because wasn't that one of the things that we were known for? 

Yeah. Well, it's funny. There's also a perception that we were uber wealthy back when we were first graduating from college and bought homes.  I'm sorry. The interest rate on my first mortgage was 28%. 28%  and they're complaining about five.  I'm sorry.  And I did not make 100,000 a year. I made 40.  But, I didn't have these gender reveal parties. I didn't have all these fancy things that they spend money on.   We ate Kraft dinner and Mr. Noodles and did what we had to survive.   So there is that perception that we had it easier.   I worry about the next generations because I want them to succeed, especially the females, because I don't want them to be left behind. So many executives from huge corporations, after working so hard to get these jobs.   During the pandemic, they realized, that they don't really want to do this.   So they stepped away.   But now it's not being filled by other females, they're being filled by other males.   So I'm a little bit worried about that generation. 

I think one of the things that I'm seeing that I struggle with is certainly in the workplace when working with younger generations, there seems to me to be a sense of entitlement without having put in sweat equity for things like raises and promotions and being able to leverage whatever time off you want and being able to switch from job to job.   But I think, too, when I look back on my career and how hard I had to work and slog all the time, not being rewarded, not moving up and to have male counterparts move up, who may have been lower on the ladder than I was and just go past me, not because of their brilliance, capacity, work ethic, or that they were delivering more.   It was because they were younger men and they could just demand it.   And I guess where I am in my world, old now, I have to appreciate and admire that.  The younger generation for demanding that there be work life balance, that the work that they do be paid.  They're demanding things that we didn't demand. We assumed you work hard, you pay your dues, and you'll be rewarded, which I don't know if it happens often.  It certainly wasn't part of my experience.  The only way I got anywhere was going back to school.   And I did work hard, and I was able to move up in my career to a certain degree when I was in post secondary education.   But even then, there was no balance.   It was working 50, 60 hours a week, week after week, with two weeks of vacation max after you had worked that much time over a year, but not two weeks together.   So really, what suffered then?   Well, then your physical health, your mental health, your familial relationships, your social relationships.   It seems like we haven't found balance yet.   In terms of the lens that we see things through, like you and I, Cheryl, I think through a lens of great privilege.   And it doesn't mean that we have to work hard.   It doesn't mean that we haven't had our share of hardships or challenges or that we haven't had times where we've had to bootstrap our lives, but we haven't had a burden of being racialized or growing up in extreme poverty or not having access to education or growing up in a restrictive religion.   I know some classmates did. 

Yeah, it's true. Very true.   The only way we're going to affect change is if we, as privileged white people, actually step in and be part of the solution.   We can talk a good talk all we want, but nothing's ever going to change if we don't get involved. 

Part of that challenge too, is how do you do it in a way that is respectful and not permitting any of the bias. 

Right. 

So being able to hold space for criticism when there are missteps 

Yes, absolutely.   Humility goes a long way.   I don't ever want to assume that I can solve their problems.  They've been fighting this fight for a long time. 

The suffering and the traumatization, the ongoing trauma, the marginalization of people and certainly working with folks who are marginalized by society for multiple reasons age, socioeconomic status, ability or disability, things like that.   One of my biggest challenges is the ongoing othering of people.   And yeah, I don't know how to reconcile that we,  as a society will accept and condone that people have to live rough.   They have to live out on the street.   There are those in society who still profit off the marginalization others.  I can't speak to it well enough do it justice.   I'm woefully ignorant on just how terrible racism is and how it's so ingrained into our social systems, our welfare system, certainly the systemic racism within the health sector.   We know it exists, we know how it manifests and we know how it then becomes a barrier to people accessing health.   But also what are the long term impacts?   Well, we know that indigenous people have much shorter lifespans than we do.   And there's something fundamentally wrong with that.   That people of colour live shorter lives, that their health like specific health concerns, like the prevalence of lupus, for example.   It doesn't get studied. And as women, we're in the same situation.   Heart attack in women is not studied. Menopause is not studied. 

I know, and you're close to it.   And I imagine you're in a different place than I am when it comes to navigating all of this because you'd probably have a nervous breakdown if you took to arms every time you saw an atrocity.   Not that you don't want to help, but you have to kind of balance out, okay, where can I actually make a difference? Where can I have an impact?   And if I rock the boat over here, am I going to ruin my chances of helping over there?   So, yeah, I totally get it. 

You and I could talk for hours and hours and hours about the problems within our society. 

I struggle on a daily basis just to be able to leave my home and not cry.   Way too sensitive. 

Yeah, but you've got a positive attitude which makes a world of difference, I'm sure. Like, if you didn't have a positive attitude, I'm sure you'd be in the loony bin by now with what you see and hear all day long.   I love your approach.  I love the fact that you assume the best of intentions to begin with.  That's the healthiest way to look at it. 

It's a challenge.   And I think maybe that you look for the gifts and adversity and I wonder if coming out of COVID part of what the gift is, is that for some of us, we are actioning that discernment now that we are drawing those lines that we will not tolerate belief systems and behaviours that fly in the face of our own values. To really look at where is values alignment. 

Yeah. And I like to hope that there's more of us out there. I want to hope that the loud ones are very few and far between.   I'm hoping that there's more of us out there that actually care and want to make a difference. 

It's a complex world. Cheryl.   All we can do is our best.  And be kind and do good work.  Support those who are also on this crazy journey on this little blue planet. 

Yeah. This was a good chat.   I'm glad we connected, and I really appreciate your time.  Thank you so much for this. This is awesome. We'll have to do it again because obviously we have a lot to talk about. 

Yes, that would be awesome