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 NOTESTues: 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 MurrayHope is a crushed stalkBetween clenched fingersHope is a bird’s wingBroken 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 childrenAnd children’s children at last . . .Hope is a song in a weary throat.Give me a song of hopeAnd a world where I can sing it.Give me a song of faithAnd a people to believe in it.Give me a song of kindlinessAnd a country where I can live it.Give me a song of hope and loveAnd a brown girl’s heart to hear it.SONG: “In My View” by Young FathersSubscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected]. 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: 30:36Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good StudiosTheme music: Gary BlakemoreEpisode cover image: Source Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.