With Alex Valoroso, Gender Equity Advisor
Alex Valoroso is a Gender Equity Advisor and consultant specializing in equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) strategies, with a particular focus on gender and disaster. She helps organizations build more inclusive workplaces, services, and systems by applying a feminist, trauma-informed, and survivor-centered lens.
Alex holds a Master’s degree in Disaster and Emergency Management and has completed specialized training in intersectional analysis, GBA Plus, and addressing gender-based violence in emergencies. She has worked in research, academia, government, the non-profit sector, and the private sector, and currently sits on the board of the Canadian Journal of Emergency Management.
Through her work, she brings a deep understanding of systemic inequities and their impact during times of crisis, and has supported organizations across Canada, the Caribbean, East Africa, and Latin America.
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Transcript
00:00:01 Andrea
Hello and welcome to Alright, Now What? I’m your host, Andrea Gunraj, for the Canadian Women’s Foundation.
Gender equality and justice, where we live, work, learn, and play is the goal, and it makes life better for everyone. This podcast is our chance to connect with insightful people and explore what it’ll take to get there in Canada.
The work of the Canadian Woman’s Foundation and its partners takes place on traditional First Nations, Métis, and Inuit territories. We are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this land. However, we recognize that land acknowledgments are not enough. We need to pursue truth, reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship in an ongoing effort to make right with all our relations.
00:00:51 AwarePod
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00:01:29 Andrea
Today I’m speaking with Alex Valoroso, gender equality and social inclusion specialist, with a focus on emergency preparedness and management. Hi, Alex.
00:01:40 Alex
Hi, how are you?
00:01:41 Andrea
Good.
So, let me ask you the first most important question, what kind of gender equality changemaker are you? You did the quiz. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the results.
00:01:51 Alex
Yeah, it was such an interesting quiz because honestly some of the questions, I wasn’t sure how to answer. But I got connector as my highest number at 38% actually, so I mean that’s not surprising because I like to connect with others, I like to network. I like to see how we can all come together, but what I thought was surprising was that collaborator was actually my lowest number at 8%, which I found was a bit of a disconnect between making connection and then as a collaborator you’re often working with others, so it was kind of interesting. And then yeah, I had creator 31% and challenger at 23, so it was very interesting to see those different groupings.
00:02:36 Andrea
Do you feel that it’s… Maybe there’s some things that we can learn about how this quiz is kind of put together. Do you feel that there could be some ways that this is telling you a truth about yourself that you didn’t think about before or do you feel like that doesn’t really reflect me?
00:02:53 Alex
Well, I think it’s a way to sort of provide a bit of a reflection on the way that I do things and so you know, we’re talking about some of the questions we might talk about for this podcast, and one of them was, you know, what are what are … sort of my big take away and not to jump into it a little bit. But it was about building community and networking. And so, because I come, you know, I’m geographically isolated… I’m in a smaller community and so that connection is so important, but then it’s like oh, maybe could I be doing a little bit more to be collaborating with others? Could I be maybe broadening my scope a little bit more to reach out and how can we really work together? Because I seem to be doing well in sort of the connection and the challenging and the creative part was a bit of a surprise to me as well. So, I think it’s like, oh, maybe like, I mean I could focus a little bit more, tune into that a little bit more.
00:03:44 Andrea
Well, let me ask you this: I mean, you have had so much experience in the work that you do and I’m sure in your life you’ve lived a life… tell me about your core life lessons that you bring today and how does that help in your effort to grow gender equality in Canada?
00:04:02 Alex
Yeah. So, I mean, there’s so many things there that I could pull from, but I think the big one, when I was reflecting on this question, was this the need for community, the need to network – and not network for the sake of networking but networking so that you can have people around you that support you, that believe in the vision that you also believe in, that can add to it, that can share different perspectives. Because it can be a really lonely work. And when, you know, like I said, I am living in a smaller community, rural community, and there are absolute, you know, aspects and pockets of gender equity that are happening in our community, but I’m not tied into it maybe the same way that someone from a big urban centre would be. And so sometimes when people ask me what I do for work, you can see the eyes glaze over, and they’re like, OK, I don’t really know what you’re talking about or why this is important. So, having that sense of community is so incredibly important.
I think it’s regardless of whatever type of work you do or the type of work that you believe in, and so that for me is a huge life lesson. It’s a core value is building communities, so go to the conferences if you can, you can reach out and connect with others. Whenever I go to a new place, I might do a post on LinkedIn or my Facebook page and say, does anybody want to connect? And I’ve been so fortunate to be able to meet face-to-face with people that I had only previously connected online or reconnected with folks from conferences. And it’s just, it’s so rewarding and it also helps to kind of reinvigorate yourself at times when you can have those conversations and just touch base with folks and be like, yeah, this is what I’m doing and it helps to validate you, but also just to gain really comforting and helps to build you up and build one another up in especially right now in this particularly challenging time.
00:05:51 Andrea
Yeah, I was, I was going to just say that. What a great reminder for us that everywhere you go, prioritize connection! You may not know 100% the quality of the connection. You may not know the type of connection you’re going to make with people, but if you just go in with that open spirit of I’m going to connect today and though it’s hard, and though everybody is feeling so lonely and disconnected and so taxed today, connection is always a gift, always something that we can use as a tool in our toolbox when we think about what we do to grow gender equality.
I’d love to ask you about your passions, Alex. Tell me about your passion, your work, and how that connects to gender equality in Canada.
00:06:35 Alex
Yeah. It’s so funny when I think about how I got into this line of work and really with this sense of addressing the inequities that I was seeing around, and I don’t even think I had the language at the time, it just felt like this is unfair, this is unjust. Why are, particularly women, facing a lot these challenging issues and what’s going on here? And so I began to do a bit of, you know, studying and learning and research and really recognizing that we need to shift the way that we do our work, whatever work it is, because really gender equity is crosscutting. I don’t think it matters what sector you’re in. And for me, my passion has been about sort of sharing that message that gender equity and social inclusion is incredibly important, regardless of the work that you do. And particularly because I’m in Emergency Management, that’s sort of my focus area, that’s an area that we really, really need to look at because for a very long time, gender equity just wasn’t even considered and never mind, just gender, like if we take an intersectional lens of perspective to that, that also has been, you know, not front and center.
So, for me, it’s really how do we shift this landscape, how do we shift this field of practice? To be more inclusive, but not just lip service, how do we really make a difference for people that are impacted, are going to be impacted? How can we mitigate against that? How do we make sure that we’re doing the right thing as best as possible and they’re ways to do and I think a big part of that is awareness for one. Again, like I said, a lot of people don’t understand what it’s about or why it’s even important or relevant. But then I think it’s also education and training for the folks that are up and coming in, the work that we’re doing. And also for us that have been doing this work for a little while it’s always a space of ongoing learning and application, and I think that’s incredibly important to be able to do so, I’m really passionate. I think about sharing the message and getting us to shift the way that we do our work and recognizing that it’s there is an opportunity there and that we can do it. It can be challenging and I think a lot of the investment in time is upfront, you know if we really look at doing a unit gender-based analysis and looking at the issues and getting the information, but it’s worthwhile because research shows that we have better outcomes when we take that perspective.
00:08:50 Andrea
Well, 100%. That’s one of the, I guess key messages of the Canadian Women’s Foundation is gender matters and not just gender — all the intersecting factors of identity and experience do matter. Let me just take a step back and ask you some basics. We’re talking about emergency preparedness and management. What does that mean?
00:09:10 Alex
I mean, so we have emergency and disaster management. It’s really this field of what happens when there’s a particular and you know, don’t want to get too technical because there’s definitions for emergency, there’s definitions for disaster, but something happens. And previously, traditionally, it was very male-dominated sphere and it’s like this thing happens, there’s a fire, there’s a hurricane, an earthquake, and you just sort of deal with that incident and that was it. That really things have changed where we’re now looking at what are the conditions that sort of exist before that particular event happened and what goes on during that event, and then afterwards the recovery phase, what is going on there, which long term recovery moves into sustainable development. So there’s this whole field of practice around emergency management, that is looking at these different phases.
And so now we’re trying to see why…not see, I think we most folks understand that disasters impact people differently. And I think COVID was an excellent example of that. People are saying we’re all in the same storm, but you know, some of us were in super yachts and some of us were in were in dinghies and some of us were barely floating on a piece of driftwood. And so it’s this recognition that disasters have impacted people differently depending on where you are. You know, it could be your socioeconomic status, your gender, your access to resources. There’s all these different pieces. And so when we look at Emergency Management, it’s all these different phases. It’s, it’s preparedness, it’s mitigation, it’s the response component which I think is what tends to be focused on and then recovery. And so we really want to take a look at all those different pieces because disasters are happening more and more frequently and there’s less time to recover in between them and the impacts are being felt more and more. So it’s,I think it’s really important that we begin to break it down and see how do we do this work in a really thoughtful way to mitigate some of these predictable impacts.
00:11:02 Andrea
The Canadian Women’s Foundation was in the pandemic in particular was talking about shock proofing. The idea of shock proofing our communities from disasters with that gendered lens, that intersectional gendered lens. I’m curious, for many of us, the pandemic feels like a distant memory. It is not. It’s still relevant, but tell me about what you’re thinking will be the shocks, the emergencies we will really need to prepare for with that wise intersectional gendered lens going forward.
00:11:35 Alex
I mean, to be honest, so in Emergency Management, we have this thing called an all hazards approach. So it’s like regardless of what the particular hazard, so again, like your hurricane, your earthquake, your fire, whatever it is, we have to kind of prepare for these different impacts. And I think depending on the community that you’re in, you know where I am right now, the chance of a hurricane, that’s just not going to happen. We have wildfires, forest fires, flooding- those are kind of the big ones, right? And so it’s really thinking about if we are continuing to have these at a faster and faster pace with less time to recover, there is a mental health component, mental health and well-being component, that I think isn’t always being addressed. And so that’s a big factor. So not you know there’s this stress, there is insecurity around what’s going on, ability to access resources becomes, I think less and less because it’s just… there’s so much going on all the time and a lot of the community service organizations that provide these services in times of disaster are also being stretched thin. And it’s funny you mentioned COVID, you’re right, I think you just hit the five year anniversary, quote-unquote of COVID, but we are not back at full complement. People are not OK. No, I don’t think anyone is at a 100%. And so, you know, personally, emotionally for folks, not 100%. And then if you work in a particular business or environment, you’re probably not fully staffed and funding is always a challenge.
I think that’s what we addressed a lot of these pieces in the project we actually did for the Canadian Women’s Foundation, and looking at the service continuity guidelines for organizations gender-based violence organizations. And so, it’s just recognizing that there’s this ongoing pressure for people and communities and organizations that we need to think about. And so, we know, and if I, you know, I don’t think this is a surprise to anybody, we know that they say another pandemic is coming in our lifetime. So we have to, you know, what are the lessons that we learned from this one and how do we apply it to the next situation? But again, all these environmental components, you know, wildfire, flooding, extreme heat. Now we add in, you know, political challenges, environmental social, economic, housing insecurity, food insecurity, fentanyl crisis, I think that’s across the country, you know, ongoing racism, ongoing legacy of colonialism, they’re all compounded. So I think we can’t really treat each event as isolated, but more like what are the conditions that have led to this and how do we support? Because we could have a wildfire in one community, you know, one year and this another wildfire in the same community the next year, it won’t be the same because we’re social beings. Disasters are socially constructed and they will change their dynamic. So that’s another thing we have to think about. We really have to reflect on those pieces.
00:14:33 Andrea
I like that phrase that disasters are socially constructed. They have to be dealt with smartly, with some proactivity. I want to ask you one last nerdy question. If you had to pick the top underseen gendered impact of a crisis, of a disaster, what would you say is the top unseen that we have to start seeing?
00:15:00 Alex
I mean, I’m not sure if it’s while in COVID was called the shadow pandemic and I don’t think it’s unseen for those of us that are doing this work, but it is gender-based violence, 100% is gender-based violence. And I think it’s picking up a bit more awareness because of COVID and there’s a bit more focus, but still at the end of the day I don’t see mention of it in any sort of planning components. I don’t think I don’t see being really considered and when we talk about it in terms of Emergency Management, it’s like, oh, well, this nonprofit will deal with it or this shelter will deal with it, but that particular nonprofit or shelter, women’s resource centers also going through the disaster, probably at the same time, they’re also stretched thin. And if you as a municipality or community did not connect in with that organization around services or support, I mean there’s a big disconnect there. So I think it’s really up to all of us to really think about these impacts. And we know research has shown again that in terms of disaster, gender-based violence increases. And with COVID, I think there was like 300-400% increase was noted even here in BC. So, it’s a big piece and I’d like to see us do more work around addressing that and mitigating against it and really counting for it when we do our planning around Emergency Management or just even our Community planning to be quite, quite, you know, frank in our municipal and regional district planning.
00:16:27 Andrea
Yeah, it takes everybody. I mean I think that brings us beautifully into my last question for you Alright, now what? What’s a powerful takeaway that you would give to our listeners based on all the things that you’re saying, your expertise, your areas of passion? What is one thing that we can take away from this discussion that helps us be better gender equality changemakers wherever we live, work or play?
00:16:49 Alex
You know what, you don’t have to be an expert in this field. That is my biggest takeaway. And I say that as somebody who always is always like, OK, like, what do I know, what I don’t know? I think for me, the biggest thing is to get started, to take a step, to be willing to listen and learn. And these don’t have to be huge pieces. I think it can be something not insignificant, it’s small, but it’s still significant, if you see a comment that’s inappropriate, calling it out, if you feel safe to do so. Because I recognize that there’s also a safety element and I recognize that folks that tend to be historically marginalized are also doing a bulk of the work. But I think it could be like calling out a comment on social media or, you know, say, oh, actually, if you look at this resource, you’ll see why this is inappropriate or sharing a post around gender-based violence or why this particular topic or whatever it is important. I think these are really small practical steps that can have an impact because the more we see this in our environment, the more we become aware of it and the more it begins to resonate.
I remember I was working in government and I had written something and I had used the term intersectional and one of the directors of like well, I had to, our executive director was like I had to go and like Google what intersectional meant just like, OK, good that you know, OK that’s good, and now you know you fast forward a few years, people in that particular space know what it means, right? So I think that’s how we kind of build upthat awareness and starts to shift, you know, it’s small baby steps, but it’s still moving forward. Would I like it to move faster, absolutely. And so I think that we can do that as a collective, right? It’s taking these small steps, participate in community forums, take a look and see who’s missing from the room, who’s missing from this, from that space. Nominate or advocate to have other voices in the room. You know, when I’m asked to speak, I’m like, oh, great, but I actually have this person, have you considered speaking to so and so for this panel or what have you? I think there’s lots of again, practical steps that we can take to move things forward. But like I said, you don’t need to be an expert, you need to take a step, be able to, be willing to start, be able to be willing to learn. There will be mistakes, there will be missteps. So I think you also need to be accountable for that. There’s lots of great blogs and information on a lot of disinformation, but there’s a lot of good information online. And this is also where that networking comes in, because then you get to see what other people are seeing and sharing and saying. And that builds your own awareness and your own, I think capacity and competence. And so I think all those pieces really help you build something and we can really work together to achieve gender equity and social inclusion.
00:19:36 Andrea
Alright, Now What?
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