The Year I Spent A Decade On The Carnegie Board

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The Year I Spent A Decade On The Carnegie Board

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A report of my time as a Board Member for the “Living Room”
of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, B.C., "Canada's poorest postal code"

By
Rachel Davis, Member
of the CCA Board of Directors, but
not representing them in their entirety

    The other day someone asked me why I wanted to be a Director
on the Carnegie Centre Board in the first place, and it was hard to think back.
It seems I’ve lived lifetimes since last June, and I tell  you, if re-incarnation is all about
growing as a soul, well, mine is certainly larger than when it all begin.

    I know William Simpson had a lot to do with my motivation.
William Simpson is a Home-less (or, home-free, as he likes to call it) man who
had been kicked out of the Learning Centre at Carnegie (soon to be kicked out
of the whole building) because they suspected he was the author of a blog, the
downtowneastsideenquirer.blogspot.com.

   The staff at Carnegie thought that this blog was unfairly
critical of them, so they’d decided to shut it down by trying to identify the
writer, and barring him. Besides bringing up the basic democratic value of the
right to free speech, this action was questionable in another way: William
Simpson, as it turns out, was not the blogger.

   When first I heard about William being kicked out of the
Carnegie’s Learning Centre for writing the DTESEnquirer Blog, I was really upset,
and so were other members who heard about it. It was so patently obvious to
anybody who’d ever really talked to William that he was incapable of writing
that Blog. I was so outraged by this failure on the part of the Carnegie staff to
act within the Mission Statement of Carnegie (our Mission Statement says we are
supposed to work out our differences with respect, patience and understanding)
that when I heard William might be running for the Board of Directors, I
thought I would run too.

   My motivation was the same that makes me support people in
the music program for decades: I knew he was going to have to make a speech and
stand up and all, and I thought he might be more comfortable and feel better
about it if I was there too, going through the same process.

  Amazingly enough, we were both elected. I say amazingly
because usually the board at Carnegie elects itself year after year, they are
naturally the biggest voting block at the very poorly attended Annual General
Meetings at the Carnegie. But William had a platform, one of Pro-enrichment,
and against co-dependant povertarianism, and there were some supporters of that
idea there who voted him in.

   I think I got elected because there were a few people on the
Board itself who knew me as sensible, and a fair number of people in the
meeting who had seen me around the Centre for some of the 28 years I’ve been
there. Maybe my speech had something to do with it. Nominees for the Board of
Directors are given a minute or two to speak, and I think I said something
like: “Anybody who knows me know that I will stick out my neck for what’s
right, and if I’m elected, I would be honoured to stick out my neck on behalf
of all of you.”

   Little did I know what the experience of being on the board
of Carnegie would cost me. My job at Carnegie, Hundreds of hours of writing
emails and researching rules, and hundreds of dollars in lawyers fees, trying
to defend my reputation, and that of William Simpson, my fellow newly elected
Director.

   Within a week of his election William was met at the door
with a letter from City Hall barring him from the whole building, not just the
Learning Centre,  for having a link on his own website, to the one he was formerly
accused of writing. The Downtowneastsideenquirer.blogspot.com.
My lawyer wrote the City lawyers and called this “Guilt by Association”, and noted
that it’s against the Rule of Law in Canada.

   Soon after his barring, William was libeled, accused of
winning the election by fraud, in the Carnegie Newsletter by the Editor, who
also singled me out in print as a trouble making time waster, and the die was
cast, it just got worse from there.

   Lately, the
abuse of power has culminated in a letter from my fellow Directors asking me to
resign. Never mind that they have no authority to ask me to step down. I was
voted in by the membership and there is nothing in either the constitution of
the Carnegie or the Society Act, or Roberts Rules that backs up what they did
to me, but I guess it was an opportunity to darken my reputation with their
letter saying they think me dishonest, faithless, and inept, but providing me
no reasons for their conclusions about my character

   If they felt I needed to be removed for the good of the
Centre, why didn’t they follow the rules and hold a general meeting about it?
That’s what the rules say they are supposed to do if they truly feel a board
director needs to go. They are supposed to  hold a meeting where every member can vote me out, just like
they voted me in. They didn’t do this because they know that the membership
understands I am working for them, and that the membership has seen me as honest, faithful and
capable for 28 years at the Carnegie Centre.

   I never anticipated that being a Director of Carnegie,
concerned about democracy, would mean that I’d be getting up at 6:00 in the
pre-dawn dark and pouring rain to pick up William in the park where he sleeps
in order to get to an interview on CBC Radio for the Early Edition. But after
eight months of fruitless calls and emails to the City and Carnegie staff,
media attention seemed the only way to resolve the situation.

   By the time January had come around, and the situation had hung
and worsened for so long, and the article in the Vancouver Sun on Christmas Eve
(“No Home For the Holidays Here”, Miro Cernetig),  produced no movement toward resolution on the part of the
City and Carnegie, I considered a pre-dawn drive just another of the unusual
chores I found myself doing in service of the membership as a Director of the
CCCA.

   To me it seemed obvious: William Simpson was voted in. That
means a substantial number of members of the CCCA  wanted him to be at meetings voting the way they would want him to. Since no other director seemed
concerned about those voices not being heard, I took it upon myself to try to
resolve the situation so that the democratic process would play out the way
people had a right to expect when they voted William Simpson in. I did it so
that their Vote Would Count.

  Those voters all knew full well that William is not the
Blogger of the Downtowneastsideenquirer.blogspot.com, they consider it
ludicrous that staff would think otherwise. The first words of Williams
election speech were “I am not ‘The Blogger’ ”. The Editor of the Carnegie
Newsletter wrote that William fraudulently claimed this to get votes, but that
is totally backwards. William’s line actually got a big laugh from the
membership that night because his statement was so ridiculously obvious. To my
mind William was not elected by the membership because he “claimed” he was not ‘The Blogger’, he was voted in because Carnegie staff
had wrongly claimed he was  ‘The Blogger’ and wrongly persecuted him for that alleged crime.

   By that one action, they made a martyr of William Simpson, and
lowered the CCCA Membership’s respect for City Staff’s powers of comprehension
considerably.

   It has been a long year, one that has made me grow as a
person considerably. I’d been an illegal alien in this country almost my whole
life, and so until recently, I never had the ability to speak out against
unfairness on the part of powerful bureaucracies. I came to the board with no
experience of going into meetings to argue with the powers that be because I’d
spent my whole adult life staying under the radar so that I could stay in
Canada.

  I can’t say that feeling like one of the official targets of
Carnegie’s wrath hasn’t hurt sometimes, but I wouldn’t trade the lessons I’ve
learned through this experience for the world. 

   The President of the Board wrote me recently and told me she
refuses to ever write me again (no explanation) this is right after she wrote
the Secretary of the Board and told him not to include me on CCCA Board emails,
(again, no explanation) she said to me:

            “This will be my last
message to you, it has not been hoot.”

It’s funny to me that she uses that word in particular.

  “Hoots” are associated with owls, which are associated with
wisdom, and I can agree that maybe, for her, it hasn’t been an enlightening
experience.

   But for me,
being on the Board at Carnegie has been enlightening and enriching, it’s made
me a more well rounded person with a better ability to stand up for what is right.

For me, it’s been at least two hoots, as well as a slice.

Rachel Davis