Bottom-Up Shorts: How To Build a Network of Advocates
Hazen Elwood is a student, a member of Strong Towns Calgary (in Alberta, Canada), and a community manager with the organization For the City. Today, Norm and Hazen discuss ways to build an advocacy network and the power of raising local awareness through storytelling.
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Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:06
Welcome to bottom up shorts. I'm Norm with strong towns, and after meeting 1000s of members, I often think I've got to tell you about this person, and that's what bottom up shorts is all about. Quick introductions to regular people who are doing exciting things. They're not superheroes. They once felt like you might unsure if they could make a difference. And today, my guest is Hazen Elwood, who is a full time student and serves as an organizer at large, which is a great way of describing the many different activities that Hazen or biz is involved in in the City of Calgary, Alberta. They also work as a community manager at for the city, and has been deeply involved in housing affordability activism and continues to work on a site called unsprawling.org to tell local stories on social media. And so Hazen, welcome to bottom up shorts. And can you describe not only your role with UN sprawling and the efforts that are underway in Calgary, but also the city's own participation in the strongest town contest.
Hazen Ellwood 1:02
Yeah, thanks for having me. Norm. So this is a really exciting time for Calgary. We just got through round two of the competition, which is the first elimination round, and we were actually pretty anxious because we were up against Albuquerque, New Mexico, who had a really strong presence on social media with all the different stories that they were able to tell at that time, they just had, like, a new bike network open up downtown. We were like, oh, it's it's going to be bad for us. They're the second largest city in the competition. We're the first largest city in the competition. But that's not always, you know, great, because then it's more people you have to reach. But we ended up making it through. And I think it's all just the decentralized kind of energy of people being able to communicate with each other and sharing things with their friends. Because strong towns, Calgary doesn't even have very much of like, a presence in our city. I think it's so much other folks in other like more specialized organizations that are doing a lot of the really heavy lifting. And I think it's, it's partially government advocacy and partially just direct action. And so that's kind of what my mission was. Is less to kind of try to, you know, compete in this, in this landscape, but more, how do I kind of bring some of these stories together and talk with these different people, and try to raise awareness of the different things that community leaders are doing in Calgary,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 2:26
and one of your goals is to really bring together a lot of these different organizations that all have overlapping ambitions and overlapping sort of visions of what a good life and a prospering place will look like when you think of what it looks like for Calgary to increasingly become A place for people to prosper. What does that look like?
Hazen Ellwood 2:43
Yeah, it's it's so multi dimensional, and all of these things are so related to each other. Like an improvement in one sector becomes an improvement in another sector, and we've been making a lot of that progress in the last five years or so. Like, definitely after COVID. I think Calgary likes to pride itself as as a very entrepreneurial city, a place where local businesses and small businesses can really thrive. And I think a lot of that has to do with just our history and our geography. We're a little bit more isolated, like we're not like a Vancouver or delta, like where you're from, where there's a port. We kind of have to figure out how to make our own economy work. I want to see a stronger economy that's built on more diverse ways of getting around the city. I think we're still very dominated by the car as kind of the central way of getting around our city. But we also have very, very strong public transportation system, the best LRT ridership per capita on the continent, which is really cool. Fact, we've grown a lot after World War Two in Calgary, and so that has defined our our sort of economic geography in the city. And so we have a lot of work to kind of refocus the city and bring more opportunity back into the core and especially the inner city neighborhoods, because our downtown is really, really dense and really strong, and then we've kind of started as we change the policy around new growth, we've changed the way that our newest suburbs are built, or a little bit more flexible, but that, like, sort of, they call it the donut of decline in the middle is where Calgary is kind of struggling right now, is really, how do we bring that investment back into the communities that were built in, like the 60s or 70s,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 4:24
and you're developing a network of people that are passionate about these things. Can you share maybe some guidance on how to do that type of networking and bringing together sometimes unlikely partners? I
Hazen Ellwood 4:35
don't know if this is super relevant to everywhere across the continent, but Calgary seems to be a very open place, where folks we had this in our submission for the strongest town competition or contest submission is that people try to keep an open inbox in Calgary, and a lot of these organizations have the have their emails publicly available, and. And that was really inspiring for me, kind of, when I first got engaged in the sort of activism network or community, like you said, is I was really just getting engaged on, you know, social media and then joining, like, different group chats. But there were people in there that were really familiar with more, like professional organizing or public relations or things, and there were just campaigns that got started up, whereas, like, let's email some people, let's see who we can get on our side. Let's build some coalitions. Let's see how much energy we can create. And I think there's kind of that infrastructure that's already built up in Calgary that I definitely wasn't a part of of building, but definitely finding those people who are doing that work. And instead of kind of focusing on building your own thing. Look for the community leaders who are already doing that really great work, and see what you can do to support
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 5:48
them. Along with that, you've taken to using social media to tell local stories. Can you describe, sort of the, not only the the impetus of that, but what's been the impact so far?
Hazen Ellwood 5:57
Yeah, I think, I think the impetus is, probably the biggest thing behind that, is that Calgary, you know, we are rapidly growing to 2 million people, but that's still way less than Canada's 40 million people. And it's way less than America's, you know, three 50 million people. And so there's just kind of a law of like media economics, that the smaller audience you are broadcasting to the less you know, reason there is to tell that story, at least from just like, a market economics perspective, and so that was, that was the impetus behind doing un sprawling, this social media project that tried to tries to challenge that. You know, we're not worried about making a ton of money from this. It's more just like, how do we present a perspective of Calgary that's more optimistic, that's more positive, more actionable? How do we get just tiny little stories, like, obviously, on Tiktok, it's like 60 seconds long. Just, there's so many intelligent things that people are saying in these communities that just get lost in these, in this private chat rooms. And so that was really the inspiration. Is challenging the sort of very cynical status quo of media, of local media in Calgary and obviously the just lack of connection and identity that I think people feel in general, like it's not just people who are like reading the Calgary Herald, but a lot of people have never read the Calgary Herald before. They're, like, tied to, if they're even watching news at all, they're probably tied to very international sources of of their media. And so we really wanted to provide an outlet for Calgarians to come and learn about the things that are happening in their city, so that they can take a more active role and not get caught up in in the sort of cynicism that I think a lot of struggling cities have.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 7:39
And then can you share, just like, how did you become this person that is capable of this but also very active and energized by it?
Hazen Ellwood 7:47
So I think a lot of it is skills that I picked up along the way that wasn't necessarily going towards community activism, like doing a lot of media production with, you know, just making silly little YouTube videos as a kid, just probably spending way too much time on social media gives you sort of a law of the land. You kind of understand how it works. And so I was always very, very politically minded, very opinionated and active person. And so I think it was just that I have lots of skills, and I'm not really sure how to use them, but I have a very, very strong desire to actually not just complain about stuff online, but actively figure out what it means to make that change happen. And it just so happened, I like, meet some people, and I put myself out there and said, I think the original thing that I did, that really had kind of sparked my involvement in this community was the Housing Strategy was happening in Calgary. It had recently got voted down by city council, and then we were getting energy together to protest that and say, What the heck we need a housing strategy that allows for flexible development across the city. One of the organizers of the pro housing organization in Calgary, more neighbors Calgary had put together, like a little mock up poster of it said, like, wanted in, like that old western text, and then, like, something like flexible housing, or like flexible zoning, or something like this, or like row homes in inner city communities. And I was like, Oh, I can. I can totally make, like, a better version of this little mock up. And so it was just me saying, like, I can provide my energy to this. And then I kind of like, went out the next day and just took a lot of photos on my bike and just put together these series of posters that we could use to to build more energy for this. And I don't know if anybody even really saw the posters, but it was just kind of that like thing that made me realize, oh, I can, I can genuinely help people out in this community. And
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 9:43
it's those small, scrappy things that, actually, over time, can really kind of catch fire themselves, or are just part of a pattern of saying, like, hey, for everything that I care about, there's, there's a local analog that's just asking for my attention. And if I begin to really dive into that, there will be change. Over time. And so as we close, can you share what gives you hope as you, as you take up this task, I
Hazen Ellwood 10:06
think what gives me hope? And I've really, in the last, even just year or two, totally flipped my perception of Calgary. I think I used to be a very, very cynical person about the city and the way it was changing. And I think a lot of that is I just wasn't aware. A lot of it is learning more about the history, like pre kind of economic boom history and pre like settler history, really learning about the indigenous understanding of this land, and just getting, like, a more thorough appreciation for the geography of Calgary, and seeing how that indigenous story of coming together to to build stronger communities does translate into the way that our communities operate today, just by virtue of being on the same land and really becoming aware and joining those communities and talking with the people, and just seeing the level of intelligence and the level of activity that is happening in those circles. I think it's easy to get cynical looking at some of the the sort of built up, you know, hegemonic media presence that's that happens in this city, the sort of, no, we can't, sort of attitude, but really kind of unplugging from that and coming into face to face interaction with people and talking about what better looks like, and imagining it and making it happen, and then seeing the success, even in tiny little ways in the last few years, has been very, very inspiring for me as a as an advocate here. Yeah,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 11:32
well, Hazen, thank you so much for sharing about the work that's underway in Calgary and the continuation of those efforts that are certainly still to come. And for those that are listening, please do go to the strongest town.com website and check out the entry that Calgary has submitted. If there's still time before this airs, definitely go and vote. And for those that are interested, check out the many different things, initiatives underway in Calgary, efforts made at the city level, but also in neighborhood, more and more and more neighborhoods of people doing place, making people taking responsibility for their places, and really helping them to thrive. And so with that, thank you so much to Hazen for being here on bottom up shorts and to everyone that's listening. Go out, take notice of those small things and take care and take care of your places.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Unsprawling (site)
Calgary made it to the Elite Eight in this year’s Strongest Town Contest. There are many great lessons that cities of all sizes can learn from their hard work. Click here to read more about their progress.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman (LinkedIn).
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