Dixie Lee van Raalte
Excerpts From Oral History Interview
Dixie van Raalte lives in New Brunswick. On December 4, 2000, she was interviewed by telephone by Debra Mayer. The following excerpt comes from that interview. In the selection, Dixie is speaking about her long-time experience in child care development work with First Nations communities and her views on child care advocacy.
listen to clip 1 3:34 1,743KB
listen to clip 2 0:59 531KB
"I was part of the National Committee that worked on the First Nations Inuit Childcare Initiative and got it to Treasury Board. I worked with the 3 largest bands in New Brunswick, plus I worked for one band in Newfoundland, and I've worked for an Innu community in Labrador. There is a community that I work for in northern, northern Quebec. I do their outside consulting manager position for that centre while I train two women from the community to take over the directorship of the centre.
Basically, once First Nations Inuit Childcare Initiative was announced centres or communities were receiving money to build and have their childcare centres. Within those communities they had some people who knew a lot about child care as far as what they wanted, what their vision was, etc. What they needed was just someone to help them take that down the road, pull it all together and come up with a plan, then implement the plan....
I hold with the premise that the people in the First Nations community - it's their childcare centre, and therefore they must take ownership for it. So what I do is I go in and I usually bring together a community committee. And have this community committee start working on surveys, etc, so that we can get a vision from within the community of what people want, what the families want, what the political powers want, how we can link with the other programs within those communities. And at times you have to do various pieces of advocacy, because you'll always have people who say "Why do we need a childcare centre? Or, Why do we need daycare in our community? Or, What is the centre going to do for our families?, or What are the benefits?"
Inevitably, I found myself holding community meetings in those areas where I worked to discuss high quality childcare. What is it? How do you get it? What do you do with it once you've got it? How do you sustain it?
I always had people within the community talk about what they would see as the ten most important pieces within those centres that they thought were predictors of high quality. And it's very exciting to see that no matter what culture you're in, the predictors come back as the same things. They want high quality trained staff; they want an open door policy; they want appropriate practices; appropriate equipment and materials. They want all the same kinds of things that we've talked about for years. No matter where I go. And people just have different ways of voicing it, but it all comes out to be the same thing."
"I can remember years ago, when I first went to Ottawa, I thought that advocating meant going out and lobbying and marching and being in there -- really pounding; marching with those placards, and all of that kind of stuff. But then, over the years, it just becomes that piece of you. In every project and in every piece that you do, every proposal you write, every project that you implement in First Nations, every piece I implement in Innu communities, is advocacy. So, when somebody asks me to put down a title.... I put 'child care advocate.' I mean, that's what I am!"
