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Avery Au from the Law and Design CoLab on seizing the opportunity to strengthen the public’s understanding of the justice system and grow a broad coalition for systemic change. 

Tell us about the Law and Design CoLab. How would you describe your purpose and what makes you unique?

The Law & Design CoLab’s mission is to use design and digital media to make legal education and advocacy more impactful. We’re an Ontario-based nonprofit that has a unique model of skills-based volunteering. Our members include both lawyers and professionals from creative industries like UX/product design, advertising & marketing, graphic design, and web development.

We scope projects by reviewing the research and consulting broadly with legal experts. Then, collaborating in small flexible teams, CoLab members work to conceive and create multimedia to amplify the impact of legal advocacy.

We hope that our work can help foster a culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration in Canada’s justice sector and strengthen civic engagement with justice issues.

We are all navigating this pandemic in different ways. What’s a key insight from how the Law & Design CoLab is responding to the crisis?

Thankfully, we haven’t had to make many changes to our work style since our team has always been a digital-first collaboration. Even before the pandemic, we often held online meetings where members participated from several different locations across Canada.

This spring, we decided to focus our efforts on building out an educational website for the Unlock Bail Reform project having a wide range of interactive features. This highly collaborative effort was facilitated using a variety of digital tools including G Suite for Nonprofits, Slack, Zoom, Calendly, Figma, GitHub, Miro, Airtable, Evernote, and Hubspot.

Currently, we’re ramping up our outreach – which is being done exclusively online – in an effort to secure institutional and corporate partners who can enable the next phase of multimedia for the Unlock Bail Reform project.

This moment is prompting crucial conversations about the structural inequality and violence faced by Black and Indigenous communities. How does this relate to the work of the Law & Design CoLab?

Structural inequality is a major problem in Canada’s justice sector that is felt in virtually every part of Canada’s civil and criminal legal systems. Right now, with both the pandemic and the global protests supporting Black Lives Matter, there’s an unprecedented level of public attention and concern being directed towards Canada’s justice sector. As legal advocates, we have an incredible opportunity to strengthen the public’s understanding of the justice system and grow a broad coalition for systemic change.

The CoLab’s work on bail reform is deeply connected to structural racism and inequality. Bail is often described as the most important decision in the criminal process because it’s highly determinative of a lot of outcomes that follow. By understanding harsh realities of the bail process, we also gain insight into problems with the criminal justice system more broadly, namely: how insufficient investment in social programs and community health, an underfunded legal aid system, and a culture based on fear harm the lives of vulnerable people and compromise our moral principles.

That being said, a core commitment of the CoLab is to engage audiences in a way that does not overwhelm them with hard truths or make them feel that change is hopeless. We see our efforts as “sustaining and building” momentum for change because leaders in the legal profession have worked for years to change the bail system’s status quo and have achieved some major successes.

We also believe it’s important to recognize that there are many things to be proud of in our legal system and legal culture, especially in comparison to other countries around the world.

What’s one big challenge you see facing in Canada’s democracy? How are you working on this challenge or what solutions do you propose?

A central set of challenges facing Canadian democracy is how we’ll adapt to rapid changes in our information ecosystem and their impact on our personal and social lives – challenges like disinformation, echo chambers, virality, polarization, among many others. Of course, this same rapid change has also opened amazing opportunities to reach and connect with people using interactive digital formats.

We see our work at the CoLab as part of an emerging genre of civic-minded strategic communications that leverages multimedia to engage a broader audience and galvanize action on urgent, social challenges. There’s a lot of room for innovation to discover more effective approaches. We admire many groups who publish multimedia content in this genre including news organizations, like Vox and Pro Publica, and justice-sector nonprofits, like the Vera Institute and the Bail Project.

Could you share an idea or initiative related to increasing civic engagement or democratic participation that inspires you?

Returning to the theme of fostering new kinds of civic education and engagement, there are many US organizations in the justice space that we find inspiring, for example Movement Alliance Project, Brooklyn Defenders, Media Justice, or Color of Change to name a few. We aim to bring this type of innovation to Canada by partnering with leading nonprofits and legal experts.

We’re also inspired by the many organizations who are committed to discovering how to develop and deliver human-centered legal information and services, for example the Legal Design Alliance and the Stanford Legal Design Lab.

Tell us about how the Law & Design CoLab is making its work more inclusive and building engagement with different communities. Any tips or lessons to share with others in the sector about decreasing barriers and increasing participation?

We’ve found that our volunteers – who work as lawyers, legal experts, and creative professionals – come from a very wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Part of this diversity can be attributed to our effort to cast a very wide net when advertising volunteer opportunities and events. For example, last February we held a large Creative Design Challenge and made an open call to creatives of all types that was distributed widely across social platforms and promoted by higher ed programs and cultural/community centres.

Are there specific things you need help with, problems you’re trying to solve or wishes you have for the broader sector?

Securing sustainable funding is a major challenge across the nonprofit, especially during this pandemic. Right now, we’re focusing our efforts on building corporate partnerships that can provide the in-kind and financial support to enable rich multimedia and thought-provoking events for the next phase of the Unlock Bail Reform project.

For people looking to engage with you, how can they get involved? Who can they contact?

Follow us on social media: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. To learn more about supporting our efforts or volunteering with us, please reach out to us at info@lawdesigncolab.ca.

 

The Law & Design CoLab is a volunteer-led nonprofit based in Ontario. We use design and digital media to make legal education and advocacy more impactful. We have a unique model of skills-based volunteering. Our members are both lawyers and professionals from creative industries like UX/product design, advertising & marketing, graphic design, and web development. We work with legal experts and community stakeholders to conceive and create experiences that amplify legal advocacy efforts. Our work is part of an emerging genre of civic-minded strategic communications that leverages multimedia to engage a broader audience and galvanize action on urgent, social challenges.

 

This is an unprecedented moment for democracy in Canada so we created Sector Spotlight to learn about how leading practitioners are responding to it. Have ideas for our next Sector Spotlight? Get in touch!

Jessica Johnston from CIVIX on how simple digital literacy skills as the best defence against information pollution. 

Tell us about CIVIX. How would you describe your purpose and what makes you unique?

CIVIX is a Canadian civic education charity dedicated to developing the habits and skills of citizenship in students under the voting age. We build experiential learning programs for use by K-12 educators that focus on electoral participation, government budgets, and elected representation. Our flagship program is Student Vote, a parallel election for students under the voting age. During the 2019 federal election, 1.2 million students cast a ballot in the Canadian after participating in a unit on democracy and elections delivered using CIVIX curriculum materials. Over the past two years, our focus has expanded significantly to include a deep emphasis on informed citizenship, a response to the current crisis around digital mis- and disinformation. We’ve built curriculum materials around themes such as reliable sources, algorithms and filter bubbles, and verification techniques. We’re fortunate to have an expansive network of engaged educators across the country who sincerely value and use CIVIX programs and resources.

We are all navigating the global pandemic in different ways. What’s a key insight from how CIVIX is responding to the crisis?

Of course no one has been unaffected by this crisis. With schools being closed, teachers, students, and parents have been categorically impacted as education has moved to the home. This has been a huge challenge for all involved. CIVIX’s role at all times is to support educators, with quality tools and programming that can be flexibly deployed. With the shift to remote learning, that flexibility has become even more crucial. We developed new tools over the spring, specifically to address the ‘infodemic’ brought about by COVID-19 — this is the proliferation of false and misleading information online related to the pandemic, the hoaxes, conspiracy theories, faulty expertise and the like. We called this verification module CTRL-F: Find the Facts, and built it specifically for teachers to use with students at home. We created two pathways, including a student-facing site, which was an experiment for us, as our materials have always been teacher-facing first.

We are in the midst of revising the CTRL-F module for re-release in the fall. Flexibility will be even more important with the return to school, since there is still so much uncertainty around what the year will look like. The situation could also look very different in different regions. So we are building flexible tools that teachers can deploy in ways that best suit their individual needs.

Misinformation on digital platforms is a critical threat to democracy. Tell us about the Ctrl-F project – who is the target audience and how was it developed?

CTRL-F: Find the Facts is a verification module that teaches simple digital literacy skills students can use to determine the reliability of any piece of information. CTRL-F is the keyboard shortcut for ‘find’ and the idea is that we can all develop a habit of using quick strategies to investigate news and information to determine what to trust.

The project is a continuation of our work on information literacy, which we began in earnest in 2017, as the world was really coming to grips with just how much of a threat to democracy the spread of false and misleading information is. We knew electoral processes around the globe had been targeted with disinformation, and that even the accidental spread of less overtly harmful false information was creating a polluted online information environment where it’s hard to tell what is credible.

In researching how we might address these challenges in the classroom, we found a promising body of literature from practitioners who advocate simple digital literacy skills as the best defence against information pollution, with the research to back it up. The term for this set of skills is ‘lateral reading’ and the techniques involve leaving the page where you find the information — opening a new tab and doing a keyword search, or looking on Wikipedia to find context about an unknown person or group. This is what professional fact-checkers do to quickly and accurately assess new information. It may sound simple, but the strategies are pretty powerful and form the core of CTRL-F.

To develop these tools, we teamed up with digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield and Jane Lytvynenko, who covers disinformation as a senior reporter for BuzzFeed news. The learning module itself combines a series of instructional videos with hands-on examples that allow users to apply the skills immediately to a variety of real-world cases. It was designed with middle and secondary school students in mind, but the strategies it teaches are essential life skills no matter your age.

What are your goals with the CTRL-F and what has been the user response?

We have a number of goals with CTRL-F, in terms of supporting teachers and students. Ultimately, it’s our hope that this programming will help to create the next generation of informed citizens. A big-picture goal with this work is to change the way digital information literacy is taught in Canadian schools.

Lateral reading strategies are effective, but not as widespread as one might hope. When students learn source evaluation, the typical approach involves analysis of the text itself. Strategies are often packaged in the form of a checklist. Students may be instructed to look for typos, dates, about pages, authors, or URL suffixes. They may be taught that .org is more reliable than .com, for example, although anyone can purchase a .org domain name.

Checklists are time-consuming to apply and often offer conflicting signals. They can easily backfire and lead students to draw incorrect conclusions, in which they feel confident, because they’ve applied the strategies they’ve been taught. The more efficient and effective strategy is to conduct simple research to discover context before devoting time and attention to something that may turn out to be junk, or worse.

Response to our verification work has been overwhelmingly positive. Teachers get it. They see the value in these tools and skills, which connect to every subject and can be used day-to-day in all aspects of our online lives. We’ve also had positive responses to the public-facing site as a tool for use in libraries and by other community groups.

What do digital literacy skills, students and teachers have to do with democracy?

A healthy democracy requires that the public not only has access to quality information but that it is equipped with the skills necessary to locate this information. Because so much of the information we use to make sense of the world comes to us through online channels — and because it’s increasingly difficult to sort fact from fiction and everything in between — the ability to determine whether a piece of online information is credible has become an essential skill of citizenship.

While the problem of false or misleading information online affects people across age groups, CIVIX operates from the belief that ongoing civic education beginning at a young age can be a bulwark against the worst effects of information disorder: political apathy, cynicism, and a general distrust of institutions. Our digital literacy initiative aims to support teachers in empowering students with the knowledge and skills required to locate information they can trust so that they can make informed choices that are in the best interests of themselves and their communities.

Could you share an idea or initiative related to increasing civic engagement or democratic participation that inspires you?

Just over a year ago, CIVIX assembled a local team in Colombia that has been working non-stop to develop and deliver civic education programming across the country. What they have been able to achieve in a short amount of time is incredible. In October 2019, more than 76,000 students learned about government and the electoral process, researched local candidates, and debated about topics relevant for them and their communities before casting a Voto Estudiantil (Student Vote) ballot in a parallel election coinciding with Colombian municipal elections. The team is also actively adapting CIVIX digital literacy materials to be suitable for the Colombian context, working closely with teachers to help them empower a new generation of informed, engaged youth.

For people looking to engage with you, how can they get involved? Who can they contact?

You can visit our website or find us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. You can also email us at hello@civix.ca.

CIVIX is a national registered charity dedicated to building the skills and habits of active and informed citizenship among young Canadians. CIVIX provides experiential learning opportunities to help young Canadians practice their rights and responsibilities as citizens and connect with their democratic institutions. Student Vote, the flagship program of CIVIX, is a parallel election for students under the voting age, which coincides with official elections. In the 2019 federal election, 1.2 million students cast ballots from over 8,000 schools.

 

This is an unprecedented moment for democracy in Canada so we created Sector Spotlight to learn about how leading practitioners are responding to it. Have ideas for our next Sector Spotlight? Get in touch!

John Beebe on the work of The Democratic Engagement Exchange at Ryerson’s Faculty of Arts and why listening is key to growing the democracy sector. Be sure to check out the Exchange’s Democracy Dialogues virtual series.

Tell us about the Democratic Engagement Exchange. How would you describe its purpose and what makes it unique?

Our purpose is to build a vibrant and inclusive democracy where everyone living in Canada can contribute. Making our democracy more resilient requires a cross-sectoral effort, but this kind of engagement is not necessarily core to the mission of nonprofits, universities and colleges, or even government agencies. What makes The Exchange unique is that we provide accessible trainings and tools to these organizations to help them engage underrepresented communities in our democracy. We need to bring everyone from the margins into the decision making process.

We are all navigating the global pandemic in different ways. What’s a key insight from how Democratic Engagement Exchange is responding to the crisis?

People care about the larger, systems-change issues that have been exposed and become a priority because of the pandemic. There is a clear focus on the ability of our healthcare and economic systems to respond to the immediate crisis. We launched the Democracy Dialogues virtual series to unpack the political dimensions of how the pandemic is impacting our lives. The pandemic is creating new challenges and opportunities for reform in our democratic systems. This series is bringing together leading scholars and practitioners and examines how decisions are made, the stark power inequalities, how people are organizing their communities, and even how we elect leaders during this crisis.

What’s one big challenge you see Canada’s democracy facing? How are you working on this challenge, what solutions do you propose?

Disengagement and complacency. Reasonably, many people aren’t interested in the traditional levers for decision making because they are intentionally left out of the process. This means that solutions to our most pressing public policy issues aren’t designed for them. Our solution is to work with trusted community based organizations, leading scholars and committed public servants to create stronger pathways to institutional expressions of voice (i.e. voting) and to support democratic engagement practices at the community level that foster inclusive decision making.

Could you share an idea or initiative related to increasing civic engagement or democratic participation that inspires you? This could be related to your work or something you see happening in the sector. 

We want to shout-out Halifax Public Library. During the 2019 general federal election, they ran Vote PopUps across the city and made it their own. They made Halifax Public Library branded “Why Vote” sticky notes, and even held Vote PopUps in grocery stores. That was the first time that’s been done! Public libraries haven’t historically taken on active voter engagement, but they have been great allies in the work and really taken it to the next level. They are a natural partner since they are trusted, neutral, and serve diverse communities. They are also experts in open and accessible learning. We’re thrilled to have public libraries as partners across the country.

Tell us about how  Democratic Engagement Exchange is making its work more inclusive and building engagement with different communities. Any tips or lessons to share with others in the sector about decreasing barriers to participation?

We have a national focus on our work. We are not a frontline organization ourselves, but we are intentional with our relationships to have as broad a focus as possible. The Canadian Vote Coalition has representation from every province and territory, and a wide variety of sub-sectors that all serve diverse communities such as legal aid clinics, community food centres, and settlement agencies. Our primary tip is to listen. Listen to your partners. Listen to your community. When we engage with people in community we start with a question “What matters to you?” Our goal is not to push a particular policy agenda. Instead our goal is to support communities so they can better use the power they have to create solutions that work for them.

Are there specific asks Democratic Engagement Exchange has for the broader sector — things you need help with, problems you’re trying to solve or wishes you have?

The democracy sector is tiny in Canada. But all Canadians rely on and benefit from a vibrant and inclusive democracy. Whether you are working to address the challenges associated with climate change or worried if your kids are getting a decent education, a healthy democracy is foundational. As a sector, we need to build alliances and make the case for active democracy.  And while we can’t expect our allies to turn away from their mission critical work meeting basic needs, we must find ways to enlist partners beyond the narrow “democracy sector” to actively engage democracy.

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The Democratic Engagement Exchange’s mission is to build a vibrant and inclusive democracy where everyone living in Canada can contribute. Together, we can build healthy communities and find solutions to our most pressing challenges. For too many Canadians our democracy isn’t working. One third of Canadians report they never talk about politics. In the last federal election, eight million eligible Canadian voters chose not to vote. Follow @RUEngageX

 

This is an unprecedented moment for democracy in Canada so we created Sector Spotlight to learn about how leading practitioners are responding to it. Have ideas for our next Sector Spotlight? Get in touch!