Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 212: A Life in Community Development — with Michael Clague
Speakers: Sena Cleave, Am Johal, Michael Clague
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Sena Cleave 00:02
Hello listeners! I’m Sena with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Michael Clague, a community developer who has spent decades connecting underserved people to much-needed supports and programming. They begin by discussing Michael’s early service work as a UBC student, and move into conversation about the BC labour movement, community arts programming, and Michael’s new book, titled So, How Have I Been Doing At Being Who I Am?: At 82, A Life In Progress. Enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 00:47
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We're here with our special guest, Michael Clague. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Clague 00:56
Thank you very much, Am.
Am Johal 00:57
Michael, wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Michael Clague 01:02
The short version is that I'm 82. I've been involved in community development work almost since that point of time when I put out a community newsletter in my Dunbar neighbourhood at age 10. And the rest is history, as they say, but most immediately as director of the Carnegie Centre from 1999 to 2005.
Am Johal 01:24
Well, Michael, you don't look a day over 72, to say that you're 82...
Michael Clague 01:28
You've made my day!
Am Johal 01:31
Michael, I met you during the time that you worked at the Carnegie Centre, but I'll wait to come to that. You've recently released a personal memoir about your work and life. And I'm wondering if you can begin with just sharing where that project came from and what you were trying to do in working on a memoir.
Michael Clague 01:52
After leaving Carnegie, I was doing a fair amount of writing — some of it just opinion pieces for newspapers and things like that. But I was anxious to get into some really big questions around community development, and the idea of progress and those important topics. And people kept telling me to tell my story. And I was resisting it. I wanted to deal with this big stuff first. But finally I said, "Okay, I'm gonna do this story." And so the title I set aside about five years ago, actually, and it's So How Have I Been Doing at Being Who I Am at 82?: A Life in Progress. [It's] a story of my personal life and my life in community work as well. And so about 18 months ago, the time had come to do this thing. And I sat down to do it, it was great fun, I enjoyed doing it. And here it is now.
Am Johal 02:49
Just in terms of that period of your life growing up in Vancouver, you're almost a pre-Boomer in a way.
Michael Clague 02:57
I am a pre Boomer, definitely—five years before.
Am Johal 03:00
And in some sense, when you take a look at the world that we live in today, very much is still a bit of a thumbprint from the world that was created after the Second World War in the aftermath of war, and kind of ideas of progress and justice, and "never again," and all of these kinds of things. And I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to you as a young person in terms of you know, what drove you to start working in community development, even though that might not have been the term used, probably retroactively applied to the kinds of things that were happening?
Michael Clague 03:37
Well, even from my beginning in 1940 through to the end of the war, the war just soaked itself into who we were and what we did. Going with my dad to the local victory garden, you know, for vegetables. Toys that my father made for me, because there were no toys available in those days. The street blackouts in Vancouver. So all of this we were very conscious of. When the war ended, I remember also going with my dad downtown to the [Canada Pacific Railway] station. He put me on his shoulders, because we were celebrating either Victory in Europe or Victory in Japan Day. And there were huge crowds around at that point in time. So that really soaked into me. And then as I became a student, I became keenly conscious of the efforts to immediately start building a different kind of world to avoid World War II. It was reinforced when I moved with my parents, a single kid, to West Germany, and we lived there for two years, '54 to '55. And so there we were, in Germany and in Europe with and that just again reinforced what war can do—the awfulness of war, and the efforts to rebuild so I was a willing receptor to that.
And when we moved back to Vancouver, I became active in the United Nations Club at Kitsilano High School and became quite conscious of all the different efforts of peacebuilding by governments and nongovernmental organizations at that time. And then at [University of British Columbia], which I went to in 1960, there was early talk about what students can do to make a better world. And so a friend of mine, Brian Marcin discussed the idea of having UBC students do overseas service work, but we were inspired in part one by President Kennedy who was launching the Peace Corps at that time, but there were also Canadian initiatives underway.
This is a story that illustrates that kind of time. UBC was big for its size then, 12,000 students, but Brian and I sat down and typed a letter to the President Norman Mackenzie [of UBC]. We walked over to his house, rang the bell, his house was on campus, Mrs. Mackenzie answered. And we said, "Well, we have this letter for the President." And she said, "Well, he's not in right now. But I'll put it under his pillow." And she did. And the next day, we had a call from the president's office and Norman Mackenzie said, "We're going to get going on this project, we're going to form a president's committee on student service overseas." That was my first brush with the idea of student activism and at the same time the civil rights movement was underway. Michael Audain had returned from his freedom bus ride and arrest in United States. And then we met Michael and talked with him. And then the other part of it was while this other kind of civil rights and international service work was ongoing, I'm saying, "Well, I'm a volunteer, and I work as a student with the YMCA, what can we be doing in our own community neighborhood?" And at that point, the 'Y' gave me okay to approach the Chief and Council of Musqueam community. And the Chief then was Canada's first woman Chief Gertie [Gertrude] Guerin. And so I did. And the upshot was launching a student project under the sponsorship of Chief and Council on the Musqueam reserve. In summertime, it was recreation and leadership development. In the winter, it was tutoring and study activity. That's when community development started expressing itself, on my part. It was a wonderful experience.
Am Johal 07:40
It seems to me when you describe that story with the president of UBC, it feels so quaint and polite to ask for something and it simply happens. Things have become more polarized since then [laughs].
Michael Clague 07:56
We are more bureaucratic, I'm sure. The next day, I literally had a phone call from the president's office, from Dean Jeff Andrew, who said "We want to act on this. We'll convene a meeting. We'll bring so and so together, and we're gonna get going."
Am Johal 08:14
Clearly you caught the bug in terms of community development, and you'd had this experience living abroad in Germany, which probably gave you a wider worldview. And so as you finished university, you had all sorts of opportunities to do different types of work. Your friends are probably going off in different directions. And so how did you land down in [community development] work after university?
Michael Clague 08:44
It's the story of my working life—there was no plan, it just unfolded. And so as I was graduating from university, the national office of the United Nations Association in Canada had set up a new position of National Youth and Education Secretary, and invited me to take the position. So at age 22, I moved [to Toronto] to take on that job. And of course, my travels across the country and elsewhere brought me more and more into the international development work of the UN, but also to the role of students and what they could be doing.
Am Johal 09:27
Michael, you later on worked in some degree or another in the [David] Barrett administration that was elected in '72 to '75 [in British Columbia]. Wondering if you could speak a little bit to the work you were doing during that time.
Michael Clague 09:41
Those were exciting days. At that point, I had been working for the Neighborhood Service Association as a community organizer in Grandview-Woodland, Commercial Drive area. I then moved over for about a year with the City [of Vancouver] Social Planning Department. Both jobs involved spending a lot of time in the planning and development of the Britannia [Community] Centre with the community in Grandview-Woodland and Strathcona. So it was while I was at the City that I was approached about a group being formed by the Barrett government to do some pilot projects for what were being called Community Resource and Health Centres around British Columbia. And because of the Britannia work and its similar model, I was invited to be part of a team that eventually set these up in six communities around British Columbia—one in Victoria and the rest were outside the Lower Mainland. So there was a sense of energy that things were possible, and we just needed to get on with the job. Bob Williams' book [Using Power Well] touches on this magnificently, and it's true: let's just try and see what what happens. It was go go go, and at that point I was 30-something, maybe 32. Here I am with a team, there were 8 of us reporting directly to the Ministers of Health and Human Resources working on these projects, which then were brought back into the system. And we had a lot of back and forth with other Barrett initiatives at that time, the Alcohol and Drug Commission was getting underway, and so on.
Am Johal 11:25
So coming out of that period, what did you do after that?
Michael Clague 11:29
I left the province [of Ontario] and became the first director of the Britannia Centre—it was too good to miss—from about a year before the opening till 1978.
Am Johal 11:43
Yeah, community centers and all of those things, at least the model that Britannia was built upon was so unique and still gets written about and thought about and reimagined in various ways. But what did you find about being in a community center context, which of course you later on, went to the Carnegie Centre, of course, but what was it about the model that was particularly inspiring at the time?
Michael Clague 12:06
It goes back to my short life in Ottawa from '68 to '70, when I was working for Senator David Croll, and organizing the public hearings on poverty across Canada, and that's when I learned that the idea of the Britannia Centre was being tossed around in Vancouver. And that was a model I had become familiar with. It was surfacing in the community work literature. And so when I saw this was happening, I said, I want to get back to Vancouver. So I resigned as a career public servant. My wife, my daughter, and I loaded up our car with what we could afford to move and drove out to Vancouver and started work here, which was on Britannia. There were three things which attracted me to the model, and to Britannia's specifically. One was that it endeavored to decentralize services to community—human care services. Two, it endeavored to coordinate and integrate service for the obvious advantages that would bring. And third, community management: so there would be an independent body locally elected with its own civil service administration, which actually would manage and coordinate the services in the centre. That was and remains a very, very exciting model.
Am Johal 13:22
Michael, you've also had a long history with the Social Planning and Research Council (SPARC) and the research kind of aspect of these social trends, socio economic inequality. But also during this period, we start to see the rise of neoliberalism, which affects what's happening on the ground and the way that public services are thought about, or in some cases, you know, attacked or defunded. And I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit about your time at SPARC?
Michael Clague 13:52
Yes, I joined SPARC in 1985 and was there until 1991. And certainly there was this political transition in public life, where we had gone through this rich enthusiastic time of "let's do things," that there's an activist place for government and that civil society and nonprofit groups were an integral part of that vision. And by the time I got to SPARC, all of that was in retrenchment, being pulled apart. The neo-conservative world was very much in the ascendancy, the Fraser Institute here, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, were all the political flavor of the month and we're still unfortunately suffering from those. Their dominant themes were that the less government did, the better. And that government needs to do foreign policy and defense, but the idea of safety nets and things, those are the job of communities and families. And my wife, Barbara, and I visited England at the height of Thatcher in 1984. And she said, "There's no such thing as society, there's only individuals." And the Bishop of Liverpool made his famous statement saying "No, there is not. There is such a thing called a society and we have obligations to one another and the state has an active role to help make that happen." So at SPARC, we had to move very quickly to try to change the message and to take on the Fraser Institute. In those days, we'd be in situations with Michael Walker [founder of the Fraser Institute] at the other end of the table and Michael Goldberg, who was our Director of Research was pumping out very good data at that time, and Bruce Levins. So we were dealing with things like welfare rates, housing, income disparity, and getting them out as widely as we could.
Am Johal 14:48
And what did you end up doing after SPARC?
Michael Clague 15:51
During this time, I was very active with Operation Solidarity, which was the labor end of things, and the Solidarity Coalition, which was the citizen group part of it. I was part of the meetings and campagins at the Federation of Labor, up to the edge of a general strike in British Columbia—now, those were fascinating times. I'll never forget. I mentioned this in the book that Norman Specter and Bill Bennett summoned the Operation Solidarity group to Bennett's home in Kelowna to see how they could avert the strike. Jack Munro of the International Woodworking Association went, and they came to an agreement, but it was all about what labor needed, there was nothing in it for civil society. We got closed out of that. And people like Renata Shearer, who was the head of that carried on and Patsy George for some time after that. But that was a huge disappointment when that fell through.
Am Johal 17:03
We recently interviewed David Spaner, who just wrote a new book about Operation Solidarity. I was a 10 year old kid when it happened, and during the lead up to the bigger strikes, we did a walk out of school at the time, as well. And so it was amazing how participatory and how politically an exciting time that was. And of course, we have that deeply polarizing moment in BC politics that Dave Barrett vs Bill Bennett elections, which were legendary of themselves, it was quite a time. And so after SPARC, what kind of work did you do then?
Michael Clague 17:41
Well, I'm going to pause if I can, because I'm going to [answer your question]. But just to emphasize that my memoir is a personal and work journey where I'm trying to take seriously Socrates' admonition that "an unexamined life is not a life worth living." Through all the personal and work chapters of my life, I've paused to reflect on what I've learned about myself [and to ask] "Am I changing as a result of these experiences? What are people telling me about myself? How am I absorbing it?" And so I also tried to explore my personal impact on the places [where] I've worked, the mistakes I've made, and those things that worked well. And after SPARC is a good example of that, because I was let go from SPARC, actually. And SPARC went through its own turmoil. And so that's the point. In community work, you become a freelancer, you call it a consultant, it's another term for being out of any steady employment. [Laughs] And my daughter who was about 10 or 11 at the time, when she realized I wasn't going to be at SPARC, she says, "What are you going to do, dad?" And I tried to explain, and she says "Oh, so you're for rent." I said, "You're right, Ellen, that's what I'm doing." It was a very rich period. I kicked around in a whole bunch of different communities in BC. Elkford in the East Kootenays, a coal mining town, worked with them on developing a community plan and worked with nonprofit groups and local governments. And I just soaked it up. I loved it. I also did some work in that period as a consultant with the Union of BC Municipalities' local government. I was also heavily in volunteer I was president of the then Canadian Council on Social Development.
So anyhow, that stuff was all going on. But the income was a little bit wobbly, [it was] time to cash in another RSP. And a friend Xeroxed me a posting... fax! That's what it was, we used to fax. [They sent me] a posting for the director of the Carnegie Community Center, one of these stilted little things in the newspaper. And I thought, well, that was very nice, but I'm really not thinking that I've done my stint in administration. So I let it sit there. But then I began thinking, what's on the horizon? No long term contracts. So in a sense, I could say, the need for money brought me to Carnegie. So I dropped down to Carnegie and made an appointment and I'm on the corner, looking at it, and I said to myself, "Holy S. I gotta get through this crowd to go in there." And I did, and I was really not sure I wanted to get back into administration. But I met Dan Tetro, the assistant director, and he wasn't applying for the job. The previous Carnegie director had been let go. And they're a little desperate for anyone that would keep it out of the newspaper, probably. So that was okay. I had a good discussion, I enjoyed that. When I came out on the front steps, same crowd, drug activity outside, but the environment had changed. And I looked around and there were two tents that were up. And there are people playing cards in them, someone had a guitar, someone was doing artwork. And I said, "I don't know who set this up. But I really like it. It's good community work." And so it was a new Carnegie street program. So I went home and applied, I just thought, that's what this place is doing, community work, that's for me.
Am Johal 21:39
And it's such a beautiful space walking into the Carnegie Centre. They're a community that's been built up over time. The Carnegie Community Action Project, an independent activist organization, started the Carnegie Newsletter, which has really been an amazing source of documentation of the things happening. But when you reflect back on your time at the Carnegie Centre, what are the things that you remember in terms of the work there?
Michael Clague 22:10
I used my first two or three months just to hang out and sniff about and go out with the street program, take in everything I could, hang around the lounge downstairs in the Centre, put on a security thing and pretend I was a security guy though I wouldn't know what the heck to do if I was needed. I knew the Downtown Eastside for a long time through other lives of mine, but the more I [observed], I could see, "Hey, wait a minute. There's a different thing here. It's called the arts, the community arts." And I said, "Let's do more." Let's pick this theme up because it became apparent that the Downtown Eastside and many of the people at Carnegie are cast as a problem community for problem people. But I can see in the graffiti on the walls, the poetry in the Carnegie newsletter, and what was going on in the Carnegie workshops, these are community people telling their stories and expressing themselves. Yeah, they're talking about tragedy in their lives, but they're also talking about amazing triumphs in the situations here. So I broached the idea with staff and board and said, "How about, let's make [arts] our priority. And let's use the 100th anniversary of the building as a way to launch it and get it celebrated."
Am Johal 23:30
And that, of course, was a remarkable time during your tenure there because it also coincided with what had been a longstanding social movement around trying to push for harm reduction, because of the number of overdose deaths that were happening. The Vancouver Agreement got signed at a time where there was a lot of intractable division with residents associations, the Business Improvement Association. There was a coalition called the Community Alliance that had formed to oppose the expansion of services in the neighborhood. And when we look at like the challenges that people raise nowadays, that period in the 90s was very similar and you saw governments responding to these tensions to try to figure out something to do. And Vancouver agreement, as much as it perhaps lost its inertia after a while, during the early stages, you know, having an NPA government with Philip Owen, Jenny Kwan, who was representing the NDP provincially as a cabinet minister, Hedy Fry, and I was a staffer at the time. So I sat in those rooms and seeing people look beyond political division to work together. And also, you know, attending meetings at the time of residents' associations and business groups being quite animated and angry. And also, groups like VANDU [Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users] demanding more services faster. And so it was a very difficult time. But as a relatively young person being involved in community development, it's a great training ground to be in that context. And also it had an economic development sort of aspect to it as well. Wondering if you can speak a little bit to being at the Carnegie Centre, but also working with colleagues at the city. I mean, at the time, Donald MacPherson and Nathan Edelson were quite heavily involved, but what's your perspective around that period of the broader engagement with government?
Michael Clague 25:26
Sure, and you know, Am, as we talk, I realize that this is another period in my life where I was fortunate enough to be at a confluence of opportunity. Britannia was one, the chance to work on Carnegie was another one like that. There was a receptivity and an energy for change and as there was during the Barrett years in government as well. So Carnegie was well positioned for that, because in a sense, we weren't a social agency, we didn't have an interest to represent. People came into Carnegie because they wanted to just express themselves and so on. So under the leadership of people like Donald MacPherson, Phillip Owen and also Jackie Forbes Roberts, who was our overall boss in those days at City Hall, to help facilitate and make this stuff happen. And yes, there was a lot of debate, a lot of contentious issues and demonstrations and so on. But you can sense the movement and I observed it in our police colleagues who came to have epiphanies that they were tired of arresting people for possession [of drugs]. And if there was another way of looking at it, let's take a look at it. So we had this kind of falling into line effect across a range of bureaucracies, government levels, and interests. And there are people at Portland Hotel Society and VANDU who were appropriately relentless in pushing the need for action — like Ann Livingston. Carnegie acted as a kind of convener, we had a Tuesday group that brought all the actors together, and tried to strategize. Now, the significant thing there was that you could have in the same room someone from city engineering, a police officer, Ann from VANDU and whoever else agreeing on what needed to be done, but some of them coming from systems that weren't yet on board. So this is a good community organizing lesson — we didn't cast them as the bad guys in the meetings. Once we discovered we all were working the same way, then how do we help police (it could be constables or inspectors or sergeants) deal with [their] system? Or how could we help engineering deal with their system? So we became our own change crew within systems itself. And Carnegie as a convener was uniquely placed to do that.
Am Johal 28:07
It was interesting, I remember spending some time with Ken Doern and Ken Frail, who were representing the police on the Vancouver Agreement, and to you know, the point at which they started to where they ended up a couple of years later. And you know, there was heated conversations, but also some sweet moments of consensus in those types of things. And everyone had to kind of give a little in order to move things. And it's unfortunate, you know, I think elections and politics kind of got in the way of things. And I think also initially in how the agreement was set up, there wasn't a more formal position for the community to have. And that changed a bit over time. But I think the Olympics train started moving and got in the way and changes in government took away kind of the direction things were going. And you know, it got renewed once, but by that point, social assistance had been cut and a bunch of things that were counterproductive to what was happening at a broad level as well.
Michael Clague 29:05
You know, that's right. And I've observed this in other settings with government, you will get a cadre of progressive public servants working with community people. But behind that is a great amorphous system. And rarely is the system actually itself changed to support that cadre of people. They become isolated, and as they cause changes, they're kind of cut loose in the process. I think that's one of the reasons, by the way, that Britannia has survived the way it has, because it's got its own public service and its own board. The hope was that the Britannia model of community management would be replicated throughout the city and community centers — [but] it never really was. But because Britannia was already set up, reported directly to City Hall, City Council, and had its own system. it could act as an interference with all the bureaucratees that tried to stultify what often happens in community.
Am Johal 30:16
That's a great point, Michael. When you think about, you know, the very protracted and polarized situation, we have now, coming out of the pandemic, vis-à-vis the neighborhood, [it's a] very different time, different context, but in some sense, the dynamics are similar, the narratives can be quite similar. How do you think about the moment that we're in now in terms of what are possibilities of thinking around the places that we're stuck?
Michael Clague 30:44
Well, it's a terrible moment. And we are stuck. And it just makes me angry [where] we are in terms of the street scene that's here, and how the condition of poor people and the most marginalized people has just become worse and worse, and we seem incapable of getting at it properly. And of course, the longer we take, the bigger it becomes. I firmly believe that we know the answers that need to be done. The scale of the response now has to be huge. We have no choice about it. But the ingredients, and I have written about it a couple of times, are evident. We don't need to try a new model, a new program. We have the examples already here, if we're prepared to do them. I co-chaired with Wendy Peterson for the Downtown Eastside Local Area Planning [Process] Committee after I retired from Carnegie. And in that, we got it in as the last chapter, was a model for local governance. And where is it? You know, it's set up in a way that the community could have a really legitimate meaningful voice in how it develops in this area. What we need, and [I'm wondering] how can I speak for the community, now particularly. What we need is to create some breathing space for the community to be able to climb out of the manholes that it's under, to be able to assume those responsibilities. But to do that some extraordinary action is needed with money to address the most serious issues — those who are the most ill with mental health and addictions issues. And again, we know how to do that. But we just have to put the money behind it, and the attitude and the outlook to make it work.
Am Johal 32:41
Michael, I want to speak a little bit about your long relationship to the arts. You mentioned the Heart of the City Festival, the work at Carnegie, but you also had a long standing involvement with the [Community Arts Council of Vancouver] and wondering if you can speak to what you see as the important role of arts and culture as it relates to community development.
Michael Clague 33:04
A favorite topic, obviously, because that's what I spotted a Carnegie — how do we bring that forward into the prominent feature of Carnegie? So by the way, I should reference the man we all know Jim Green, who was always doing this stuff in music and opera particularly, and help enable what we came to do at Carnegie. I was at the [Community Arts] Council, as board member and as President, for I don't know, probably five or six years after leaving Carnegie. And what we were doing was really picking up from the work that began in the Downtown Eastside to take the message of community arts citywide. [We thought,] here's what we've learned in the Downtown Eastside, and every neighborhood in Vancouver should have an opportunity to do that. In saying that, I want to emphasize that the [Community] Arts Council really owes its existence today to the fact that some people in the Downtown Eastside like Sharon Kravitz, who was our Carnegie arts person, and a street program coordinator, really said, "We have a match here, we have the Arts Council, which is almost more abundant, and we have this rejuvenation of the arts in the Downtown Eastside. Let's put them together." And so we did. And so the initial work of the Arts Council was to nourish what was already underway in the Downtown Eastside, but over time, move that out into the city as a whole. And so there is a Community Arts Fund, which is now operating. And I was at the Roundhouse last weekend, because [the Arts Council] now sponsors the [Vancouver] Outsider Arts Festival, which is marvelous. And this is for the visual arts primarily, an opportunity for anyone who is an artist or don't even think of themselves as an artist, to get some space and time to exhibit. It's just marvelous to see what that does for people but also for community perceptions as well.
Am Johal 35:16
Michael, your memoir is also a very deeply personal one you talk about your partner for many years, Barbara, wondering if you could speak about your relationship and the importance of that. Your work and your personal life was very intertwined in many ways.
Michael Clague 35:33
Indeed it was and we met at the United Nations Association, and we were 22 and we got married when we were 24. I mean, people wait now to get married, but [back then, people our age were] getting married. So we said, what the heck [laughs], we'll do it too. But we grew up in our relationship. We weren't, I don't think particularly mature, when we got married, we were figuring it out day to day, what the heck are we doing here in this relationship? But it was set within the context of the work we were doing, which was social causes, and community work. Barb came to work after the UN with the Student Christian Movement, which was an activist Christian organization for a while. And later, of course, she became very involved in Planned Parenthood in Ottawa. With friends, she set up the first birth control clinic, before it was legal to do so. So our volunteer work and personal relationships, they all came together, and our poor kids had to join the marches [laughs], peace marches, or Vietnam marches and so on. But we were learning how to be as a couple as well. And from the start, and I do talk about it in the book, we are very strong about the notion of independence through interdependence. We did not want to simply become defined by the other within our own relationship. We wanted to have our own work worlds, our own personal worlds, all of which contributed and strengthened our relationship, but they challenged it as well.
Am Johal 37:20
And I know, Barb hasn't been with us for a while. And you've both had long standing involvement with the Unitarian Church as well.
Michael Clague 37:29
Yes, Barb died 10 years ago. An important family thing [is] that she died in March of 2010. And I had finished the first draft of the book. So my two adult daughters managed to get away from their families, and we went to the Sunshine Coast for three days, and worked through the manuscript. I wanted to make sure they were comfortable with it. And of course, it was a great opportunity for them to say, "Dad, you're completely out to lunch for this," or whatever it was. But we talked about their lives as well. So writing the book also was a way to talk about the life that we have led up to Barb dying, and since that time. And the Unitarian Church for Barb and I has been long a part of our lives because we value the arts, we value the social activism of the church, and we value its broad, eclectic openness to a variety of faiths and beliefs and non beliefs, humanistic beliefs as well.
Am Johal 38:45
Now that you're still eighty-two years, young, Michael, what are you getting up to these days?
Michael Clague 38:48
Well, just getting up the stairs [both laugh].
Am Johal 38:50
I know you still cycle.
Michael Clague 38:55
I do in a way. The COVID was a bit of a boon because A, the writing was uncluttered by distractions, and I increased my cycling even more. So it was kind of an ascetic existence, between the writing, the cycling, and so on. These days, I try to be engaged around projects, I'm shying away from ongoing committees or boards. I let others fuss about those kinds of maintenance responsibilities. It's been primarily with the Unitarian Church. For instance, we've just completed a series co-sponsored with Multifaith Organization, and it's called [Mobilizing Faith and Spirit for the Climate Crisis]. And so we have one more presentation, which will be the Unitarian one. But we had a number of faiths speak with respect to "Actually we hear a lot of stuff about the climate crisis, but do we hear a lot about the need for resilience and people's mental health and coping? And do religious traditions and faiths and belief systems have a contribution to people's sanity, frankly, and mental well being?" So that's been a big chunk of [my] time.
Am Johal 40:14
Michael, wondering if there's anything you'd like to add?
Michael Clague 40:17
Well, I am a work in progress, I think, a life in progress. And I definitely wrote [my book] with that in mind. So I stay engaged. I've learned a bunch of things and maybe, and as we all do at this age, I wish I could revisit to do [things] differently. In the book, I talk about what I might have done differently in these situations. But there's one thing that hit me, I mentioned at the end of the book — a message for community work. And the message is simply this: stick to your principles, but not to your answers. Be prepared to let your answers go because someone else's may be better than yours. So often we get trapped in "It's my principle, it can only be expressed through my answer." And I say we become self defeating and we lose a lot of partnerships with others when we do that.
Am Johal 41:13
Well, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Michael Clague 41:24
Thanks for the opportunity to get into the radars. [Both laugh]
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Sena Cleave 41:24
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Michael Clague. Head to the show notes to find resources mentioned in the episode. You can also find Michael’s book, titled So, How Have I Been Doing At Being Who I Am?: At 82, A Life In Progress. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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