There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.
– Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican bishop and theologian, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, 1931-2021

Today’s EED is from Guest contributor Nicky Byers. Nicky leads the Society of Richmond Children’s Centres on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Watuth nations in British Columbia, Canada. She is also an ECE instructor, leadership coach, and communities of practice facilitator.

As I sit at my desk, as the administrator and leader of a multi-site non-profit child care organisation, and open my email, I scan the emails with some trepidation. What will these emails hold? And how will I attune myself to what comes after I click on them? There may be marvelous opportunities, there may be some hard-to-hear criticism of a decision I made, there may be a resignation of a team member, and there will assuredly be a myriad administrative/budget/facilities issues to be dealt with. I am often sucked into rote mode of checking through each email, solving a problem, formulating a response, connecting with a vendor and while there is satisfaction in a TO DO list fully crossed off it leaves little time or space for dreaming and planning and little energy for initiating and innovating towards substantive change.

And I believe we need substantive change at every level in our field today. Pedagogy, Accountability, Quality, Equity, Diversity, Care, Professionalism… now that’s a TO DO list that requires us to go upstream, as Desmond Tutu put it.

I expect every generation of Early Childhood Professionals has felt some urgency to change something, to move forward in our thinking and practice and I know many of us involved in conversations facilitated by Exchange are energised towards substantive change and we will need to work collectively to start making the change we wish to see.

I am ready to hike upstream and sit on the bank with all of you and make a plan to stop us all from falling in. Who is with me?

Exciting things are happening with the Exchange Reimagining Our Work Initiative. Thank you, Nicky, for sounding the call.

Learn more about the ROW Initiative here, and consider joining us on August 29th at 4pm PST/6pm CST/7pm EST.