Gender-Based Violence Learning Lab
June 2020 - March 2022
In partnership with The Systems Sanctuary
Funded by: NS Advisory Council on the Status of Women and the Standing Together Shift Grant
This project will create a thriving “community of practice” for actors working across the field of gender based violence (GBV) to work systemically together to shift the major root causes of GBV in Nova Scotia. The “GBV System- Community of Practice” will be an innovation lab, a place to connect and deepen the relationships necessary for the collaboration to transform the environment that contributes to sustaining GBV. It will provide an infrastructure for learning, knowledge exchange, shared sense-making, and strengthening our collective capacity for transformational change in preventing GBV.
We will gather a cohort of 24 key system actors with diverse identities and experience working in GBV across sectors and departments, to engage together in a series of 10 skillfully facilitated learning and peer coaching exchanges on a systems approach to addressing GBV. The cohort will include members across gender, (including men), with an equity lens sensitive to African Nova Scotian and Indigenous colleagues.
Through in-person and web-based learning we will collectively create the conditions for deep systemic change, exploring models and frameworks for using a system lens, competencies and roles for system leadership, and tools for mapping complex dynamics in the ecosystem of GBV in the Province. And with the expert guidance of the Systems Sanctuary partners, the cohort will develop with a sense of community, trust and curiosity together that is the ground for inspiration and emerging innovation.
GBV, like most of the intractable issues in the world, is getting more complex, not less. With roots in patriarchy, misogyny, sexism and gender inequality thousands of years in the making and deeply embedded in all the structures that govern our lives, our best efforts have barely moved the needle on incidents of GBV in decades. The patterns and mindsets that keep GBV entrenched are institutional, socio-cultural and systemic. Significant change in these dynamics cannot happen merely at the individual or even organizational level. It requires a whole system approach, and building capacity for growing numbers of change agents to become adept in the tools and lenses needed to address them at their roots. This pivotal shift in thinking, seeing and strategizing from a systemic lens will serve the quest for innovative ways to prevent harm and better serve those most vulnerable.
The Systems Sanctuary co-founders, Tatiana Fraser and Rachel Sinha, bring over 30 years of experience working with system change leaders and cultivating capacity to navigate more adeptly through complex issues and transformational change. They are recognized as innovators in the field of systems leadership, but importantly for this work, they also align this body of expertise with a feminist perspective, a gendered analysis and an equity lens that is unique in the systems field.
This project is an opportunity dedicated to building collective capacity for change agents working in the GBV field to integrate a systemic view of their work to transform how we see, think, collaborate, strategize and act to prevent GBV in Nova Scotia.
To learn more about the Standing Together Domestic Violence Shift grant ‘GBV System Learning Lab’, click on the image to read the full final report.
Links to the Standing Together Reports that recently came out from NS Advisory Council on the Status of Women are also available below:
