Setting Up Families For Success with Krista Flint

Oct 3 2023 • 26 mins

Krista Flint, Executive Director of Highbanks Society, joins host Melanie Nicholson to talk about how organizations can break the cycle of trauma. Krista speaks about how the research-based model of Highbanks works through education, community support, and the deep dive of staff members in supporting young mothers.

Krista notes that Highbanks Society operates differently from traditional nonprofits in the sector due in part to the deep dive of ongoing involvement in family care. Education is a focus in Highbanks because they are ultimately working to break the cycle of trauma and poverty for future generations. Krista and Melanie discuss how Highbanks’ focus on research and academic undergirding gives a very real learning base from which to pivot their model if change is needed. They address how breaking the cycle is effective, the fundraising that Krista spearheads to maintain Highbanks, how leaders who hire for brilliance in others realize success, and the ways in which Krista envisions Highbanks growing. This conversation illuminates how a community-minded approach to support and education with young families can break cycles of trauma and give fresh starts to those in need.

“Many of our families come from, you know, situations where there is no consistency, there is no predictability. And so the very sort of bottom line of our model is the provision of emotionally corrective experiences in real-time. So consistency, predictability, those are important. … What happens is it's that daily provision of those experiences.” - Krista Flint

About Krista Flint

Krista Flint has spent 25 years in the field of asset-based community development and non-profit culture. She is a mom, an advocate, a writer, and a thankful participant in the non-profit community in Canada. She has served as Executive Director at The Canadian Down Syndrome Society and at Calgary Alternative Support Services, and as Manager of Social Marketing at The Developmental Disabilities Resource Centre.

Krista has extensive experience in curriculum creation and facilitation and has created models and workshops for training in the areas of Social Marketing, Social Justice, New Parent Training, and the Power Differential Evidenced in Paid Service Delivery Models.

Krista has worked with non-profit organizations across North America to help them create strategic plans, conceptualize civic and economic goals, and has become innately successful uncovering and illuminating the social capital that exists in human service when combined with a compelling narrative. She is widely published in the non-profit and mainstream literature, and is a founding member of The Belonging Initiative, a pan-Canadian initiative, which seeks to eliminate isolation and loneliness in the lives of Canadians who are often marginalized and face systemic barriers to an authentic community life.

Krista has 3 “grownish” boys Oliver, Simon and Charlie – she believes they are the most creative thing she has ever done. She loves watching them blossom into citizens who understand their responsibility to each other, to their communities and to the world at large.

Contact Melanie Nicholson | Melanie Lynn Communications Inc.

Contact Krista Flint

Transcript

Melanie Nicholson: [00:00:03] Hey, everyone, and welcome to It's a Theory. I'm Melanie Nicholson, and I'm taking you inside the world of leaders and entrepreneurs who are taking ideas and concepts and putting them into action. What really happened when they put theory into practice? Let's find out. Today we're talking everything from failing fast to staying motivated through periods of growth and transformation. Our guest today is Krista Flint, the executive director of the Highbanks Society. Krista has spent 25 years in the field of asset-based community development and nonprofit culture. She's a mom, an advocate, a writer, and a thankful participant in the nonprofit community in Canada. She has served as executive director at the Canadian Down Syndrome Society and at Calgary Alternative Support Services and as manager of social marketing at the Developmental Disabilities Resource Center. Krista has extensive experience in curriculum creation and facilitation and has created models and workshops for training in the areas of social marketing, social justice, new parent training and the power differential evidenced in paid service delivery models. Krista has worked with nonprofits across North America to help them create strategic plans, conceptualize civic and economic goals, and has become innately successful in covering and illuminating the social capital that exists in human service when combined with a compelling narrative. She is widely published in the nonprofit and mainstream literature and is a founding member of the Belonging Initiative, a pan-Canadian initiative which seeks to eliminate isolation and loneliness in the lives of Canadians who are often marginalized and face systemic barriers to an authentic community life. Let's talk to Krista. Krista, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Krista Flint: [00:01:50] Thank you for having me.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:01:51] I would like if you could start by telling us about Highbanks. What is Highbanks? Why are you here? And a little bit about the story.

Krista Flint: [00:02:01] Sure. So we actually are 20 years old this year. And we're a small organization. So we're kind of, we've kind of hit our light under a bushel for quite some time. And I think that's changing now. Our organization serves young mothers, pregnant and parenting young women between the ages of 16 and 24 who are leaving situations of violence, poverty and homelessness. And I think what's super unique about our program is that all of our mothers have to be enrolled in school in order to qualify for our program. And that's really because we know that ongoing education is the single greatest determining factor for long-term socioeconomic success. So at Highbanks, we are sort of interrupting that intergenerational cycle of trauma because all of our moms come - certainly in early in life pregnancy is trauma in and of itself - but all of our mothers, you know, again, have additional and pretty deeply wounding trauma as well. So we're currently serving 17 families. We provide them residential support. So we have 17 units, five of which are on-site at our West Hillhurst Sunnyside Building, which we're right with Dairy Lane there. And the other 12 are located in housing developments through our partners like Norfolk, Calgary Housing and Horizon Housing.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:03:17] And the school thing is interesting to me because in the past, I guess my question is, was the automatic if a young lady got pregnant, then they just drop out of school. And then was that really the first step that always happened?

Krista Flint: [00:03:32] So often and certainly 20 years ago when we first started, and our founder, Bette Mitchell, and her husband, Dr. Phil Mitchell, really sort of conceptualized this program. There was an education program for pregnant and parenting teens, and that is Louise Dene School. So Louise Dene School is it houses the pregnant and parenting program for the Calgary Board of Ed, so it's a public school program and it's located about six blocks from us, which is really sort of helpful. So that has existed for quite some time. But it meant that young mothers who wanted to continue with their education either, you know, felt compelled to or were routed to that particular school. And that's why we're located where we are now.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:04:17] So we're talking about theories. We're talking about taking concepts into execution. Can you talk about the original? I mean, you've touched on it a bit, but what does that look like in terms of actually executing that intergenerational, that break in the cycle in terms of providing that care and support? And where do these girls end up?

Krista Flint: [00:04:39] That's exactly what we're doing. We're working with cycle breakers. You know, we often say to our moms, you know, it stops with you. So, you know, many of our families identify as Indigenous, for example. Those young women, their parents are often folks who are part of the 60s scoop in Canada. And their grandparents actually very often were part of the residential school system that was really in, you know, functioning fully up until 1979 in this country. When we talk about sort of cycle breakers and this theory, our theory was if we help families ensure that their basic needs are met so they have a safe place to live, that they know that there's going to be enough to eat for them and their child, that then we could free up sort of that brain space that they had to focus on, you know, the more, you know, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it sort of helps them focus on education and self-actualization and who they're going to be in the world and that role that they're going to play. So that's really sort of the theory is if we take care of the bottom part of that pyramid and we then provide support to families that include psychological services, then we will be in fact creating that pathway, that change in trajectory for them and that then these young mothers, and more importantly, their children will not be on the social services safety net in the long term. It's certainly important from a social justice standpoint, and it's the right thing to do, but it's also the economically savvy thing to do as a community, to invest in these young lives so that they can become taxpayers and renters and homeowners and contribute economically to community, which is what we want.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:06:19] What was the most surprising thing to you or the biggest challenge that you ran into? Sort of if you think about those early days that forced you to pivot a bit and think differently.

Krista Flint: [00:06:31] Yeah. So I started - I've been at Highbanks for five years - and when I started they had had this already, this really wonderful history of interrupting that intergenerational cycle of trauma. But it was really based on sort of the goodwill and the personality and some of the values of our founding, our founder, Bette Mitchell, and her family, which thankfully, you know, that it did because we've been able to sort of pull that stuff forward. But there was a real lack of sort of research foundation to what we were doing. So we knew it was working because we had these great outcomes and we'd started to track them. But there was very little connection between what we were doing and sort of the academic undergirding of the program. So we created an actual model that connects all the things and it's called Moving The Fulcrum. And that was really our theory, and that's based in the notion of brain science and the traumatized brain. And so we're trying to put more weight or more emphasis on the positive experiences, even if they're few and far between, than the negative experiences, which often are sort of, you know, unbelievably and so many of them. Right? So for me, I guess the biggest surprise was when we started to create this academic undergirding. And we started to really think about the ways in which we were supporting families. All of the academic studies supported what was happening. And so there was this natural alignment as I say, like, we are not a faith-based organization. There's lots of great organizations that are and do wonderful work in this in this sector. That's not us. We want it to be based on research, peer-reviewed, double-blind empirical studies about what interventions worked in the long term. And that's where we came up with the notion of Moving The Fulcrum. And when I started, Highbanks had been through a huge transition. And so most of the folks who had been working there left about the time that I was hired. And so I got to build a team and we got to sort of suspend things and spend time creating the actual model. And I'm not sure that had happened before in Highbanks history.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:08:33] So when you look at that model in terms of the execution of it, is it a time-based model? Is it okay we reevaluate every year or two? Is it a... What do you, I mean, you're dealing with families. So how do you model, how do you manage the model?

Krista Flint: [00:08:51] First and foremost, we are a learning organization. The studies and the research around this information, these trauma-informed interventions, there's so much of it right now. It's very, very sexy in the sector. Everybody's talking about trauma-informed this and that. It's like drinking from a fire hose. So while we were creating this model, we started with the notion that it had to be fluid. And as the research changed and we learned new things about what working with this vulnerable population would look like, we had to be prepared to pivot, to be nimble, to be like, okay, we're going to stop doing that because the research says this is more effective in the long term. So before we even got to sort of creating the real foundation around it, we decided that it was going to be fluid and that we would constantly reevaluate everything from policies and procedures to the actual day-to-day case management and crisis intervention and support that we did for families. So that was really important. And before we created the actual 'this is what we should do' in order to support families, we spent some time thinking about what our guiding principles were. And so what's great about that is we have these 13 statements about the work and the young women we support and their children that capture for us, you know, the broader notion of the importance of the giftedness that these families have to bring to community. And so now even if we get down in the weeds, we can say, okay, is this getting us towards some of those principles that we originally said? And if the answer is no, then we stop and we pivot because it is easy to get down in the weeds on a daily basis with our families, as you can imagine.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:10:27] Yeah. And I was just going to say, how do you stay, how do you and your team stay motivated through that? I mean, change is good. Change is so important, but change can also be exhausting when it's constant and constantly, every day and every hour, it's this reevaluation. How do you keep motivated through change like that?

Krista Flint: [00:10:49] You know, I think for us, we learned a long time ago that change was in our DNA, that, you know, we were being called upon to walk in the lives of these young women and their children and that we were sort of bearing witness to nothing but change. And so the idea is that if we expect that level of change within the families that we support, then it behooves us to also be prepared to make those changes as we learn more. I think the problem often with organizations, especially larger organizations, is we get really tied up in bureaucracy and policy and do we have enough insurance to drive mom to her doctor's appointment? We learn very quickly that we didn't want to be that, we wanted one of our principles is whatever it takes, which is not easy on a daily basis, but it works. And we are also, you know, we are a, you know, we do a deep dive with families. So in other sectors, you know, case management or caseloads might be like 35 to 60 per staff member. We don't do that. We do such a deep dive with families that each of my team, my family support team, they have sort of six people that they work with and that really works. It really sort of works. We teach and build new skills through the development of relationships.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:12:04] Because you're giving them essentially a structure, a social support structure that they would maybe have never had before.

Krista Flint: [00:12:11] Yeah, you're not wrong. Many of our families come from, you know, situations where there is no consistency, there is no predictability. And so the very sort of bottom line of our model is the provision of emotionally corrective experiences in real-time. So consistency, predictability, those are important. And it's not these great big changes that we see happen that all of a sudden, you know, there's this monumental change in their experience. What happens is it's that daily provision of those experiences. So how was your math test? Smelling food when you come into our building, right, on our programming nights. Having, when we appoint apartments for our families, having four plates and four bowls that match, now, you know, they are from Canadian Tire, but they match.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:12:59] And that seems so simple to me. But is that so profound for someone?

Krista Flint: [00:13:06] It is, especially if you've never had a space of your own before.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:13:09] With matching dishes.

Krista Flint: [00:13:11] And everything we do, we try to be really deliberate. So when we have an opportunity to connect with a family on a number of different levels, we are very deliberate about it. So everything we do from the way we speak to the way that we connect with families to the way we appoint their apartments, to how our building smells, sounds, looks... We try to take advantage as one more opportunity to demonstrate the investment that we know that these families are worthy of, and these young women are worthy of, and for many of them, it is the very first time in their entire lives that anybody has connected with them on that level and said, We see you and we're glad you're here and you have an important contribution to make. It's not sexy. It's slow and it's dogged, you know, and sometimes you say, how is your math test? And they don't answer. You know.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:14:03] It sounds like a teenager.

Krista Flint: [00:14:05] Right? But we're there the next day. We're going to ask the same question and we're going to fuss over your baby because fussing over your baby is really, again, fussing over you.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:14:15] And then where have you seen, what have been some of the wins that you've seen then? How profound is it for you then, after providing this level of support and care and resilience building for a young mother to see them graduate, to see them, like, how does that, that must feel amazing.

Krista Flint: [00:14:36] It does. And again, our job is to, you know, I'm not the face or the voice of this organization. It's the greatest privilege in the world to be able to position our young mothers to tell their own story. So there's therapeutic and clinical benefits to being the protagonist in your own story. One of the things that we get to do for families who have an interest in this is position them to tell their own stories to other people. Whether that's other young mothers that are coming along sort of behind them or it's to donors or other members of the community that we're trying to advocate with to change policy. So we have one particular mom who got pregnant when she was 14. We really can't serve a young mom until they're 16 because of the rules around the Residential Tenancy Act in Alberta. But she came to us the day that she turned 16 with this one year old, and she lived on-site for a while and then moved off-site and finished her secondary school through Louise Dean and then went on to do Mount Royal University and just graduated with a degree in physical literacy and not for profit management. I tried to talk her out of it, but so, you know, those are the wins and sometimes - so that's a big win and we get to have a grad and we get to, you know, all of that.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:16:01] Demonstrating the cycle break because she now will go on to do amazing things and her kid gets to watch that.

Krista Flint: [00:16:08] Exactly. Exactly. So that's an important one. But some of the other ones are just, they're smaller and you don't really notice until, you know, sometime down the road to be able to say, oh, that's what was happening then. And, you know, when families first come to us, you know, they often come from situations where they're not sure that there's going to be enough to eat, for example. And so we have like a shared pantry in our main space and our fridge. And I can see sometimes because many of our, all of our, community spaces are we have video surveillance in our community, of course, not in their apartments, but we do that because many women are leaving situations of intimate partner violence, so we're a secure facility. But we will often see women coming downstairs in the middle of the night and filling their arms with canned goods and dried pasta to take up to their apartments and I think, okay, like that's fine because, but here's the thing. Everything in there is yours. You don't have to take it like just come down and take what you need.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:17:05] You don't have to come at two in the morning, you can come at 10 AM.

Krista Flint: [00:17:08] Exactly. But that to me demonstrates this change from a real scarcity paradigm that almost all of our moms have lived with. Whether that's emotional scarcity, connective scarcity, food and basic needs scarcity. But this idea that my life is so chaotic, I don't know what's coming next. I need to make sure that I'm holding on to everything so tightly, to an abundance paradigm, which is what we're trying to create with and for our families. There is enough and there's very little we can't do to help you. What do you need? A couch. We can help you with that, you know? And there's four plates and four glasses that match in your apartment. So it takes a long time for families to feel safe when they first come to us. And that's our job one, when they come to us, before anything else, is to make sure they feel safe.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:17:55] You mentioned donors. How do you connect with donors when you're talking about what some would say is stigmatized?

Krista Flint: [00:18:03] Oh, absolutely.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:18:04] I mean, you're talking about young, pregnant mothers. How do you make that connection and help people understand and get them to understand the theory behind what you're doing?

Krista Flint: [00:18:17] Well, it's not easy because it's a complex issue. You know, it doesn't exactly go on a billboard very well, you know, but for the most part, we don't receive government funding. So we currently have just received a very small grant through family and community social services, which is essentially the province. We're very grateful for that. But 90% of our funding comes from private fundraising. And so we've got a couple of ways that we go about it. We have our Standing Among Sisters Circle that we're very proud of. What we've tried to do is connect with women, primarily, in the community who have a bit of a shared experience with some of our families. So it could be a woman who has experienced an early in life pregnancy who's gone on to become a leader in community. Or it could be another, a different kind of a leader in community, a female, like a woman who has overcome some really significant obstacles. We find that connecting with those women and having them see the value of our work is not very difficult because for the most part they get it because they've been there. But the private and the fundraising, it's a hustle, right? I find the challenge of my role as CEO is because we're so small and we're so nimble, I do things like empty the dishwasher and, you know, change diapers. And I love that. I wouldn't want it any other way. Except that a certain amount of my time has to be devoted to simply telling our story and creating that support in community for it and the interventions that we provide. So I feel it's hard. We are at that moving from a grassroots sort of organization to an organization that has a bit more influence in the sector and can support more families. And as you know, that change from being very small and grassroots to occupying a different space in the sector is wrought with challenges.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:20:00] Talk more about that. What is that? I mean, that's, you've mentioned you're at 17 families now. You're navigating a very big period of growth. So what, how do you do that? How do you navigate that?

Krista Flint: [00:20:12] One of the big things that we do that we found to be most successful is when we're looking at our team and the folks that I have the tremendous privilege of working with every day. First of all, I need to hire people who are smarter than me and surround myself with folks that have a whole host of skills and giftedness. When I think good leaders realize that they don't have to be able to do everybody's job, we just have to be able to recognize sort of brilliance in other people and help position them in a place where they can bring that brilliance to bear every day. We hire for culture, we hire for fit. You don't have to be a mother to understand this work, but you do have to have a sense of sort of nurturing. And, you know, if you can't answer the phone with a baby on your hip, then we're probably not the right organization for you. This is where sort of those 13 cultural touchpoints became really, really important for us. You know, we believe women, which is also something that, you know, it's not my job or my organization's job to investigate the situations that family comes from. We believe them. Whatever they tell us, we believe them. We also, like, we don't stand in our job descriptions, which I think is really important in organizations.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:21:22] Which people get stuck on a lot.

Krista Flint: [00:21:24] Yeah. We've also invested in some real giftedness in terms of our marketing and communications. We have just recently in the last four months, hired a brilliant young woman who is doing our marketing and communications and has really sort of harnessed the power of social media. You know, I'm, it's not my giftedness. You know, I have really no business doing that. And I did it for a while and it was not good. So, you know, we've learned that the investment in certain parts of our work that maybe we're not as familiar with in our history have become more and more important. And we've gotten more and more comfortable with investing in those kinds of things because we have the outcomes to support it. So fully 86% of our families that we support go on to own their own homes or pay market rent. That's unheard of in the sector.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:22:14] That's amazing.

Krista Flint: [00:22:15] Yeah. And so for us, you know, if people say, well, you seem to be a little staff heavy, you got a lot of people there for only 17 families. We say all I have to do is point to our outcomes and be able to say it works. So this approach of a deep dive with families really works for the long term.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:22:33] You've said to me before impact, scale, and durability.

Krista Flint: [00:22:37] Yeah.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:22:38] Those are your three. So you've got your 13 values as an organization. Those are your three. Why are those your three?

Krista Flint: [00:22:44] So I think because we, like in terms of impact for us, if we're not at the same time as we're supporting families in lots of important ways, we have to also be sort of trying to influence the sector that families exist within. So we've had the opportunity lately to be part of housing tables and bureaucracy and policy influence. We've worked very closely with our MLA around changing and affecting policy in a way that can really change the way our young families operate within community. So impact for us is not just these mums having a change in trajectory for their lives, but it's also we like the idea of influencing sort of the bureaucracy that surrounds them. You know, scale, this has been a big one for us. You know, we need to think about are we scalable? So this growth, you know, so 17 families, the staff component, we have the investment we make in families in terms of their homes and their needs, we've spent a lot of time thinking about how do we grow. And it seems like the most responsible way is not for us to enter into a capital campaign where we make another building. We've had to really think differently about that, you know, and our theory is if we are able to create this whole like what Highbanks does, how we do it, why we do it, all of that from our hiring practices to our programming, and then we could provide it to other communities, other organizations to have them replicate it. So that's, that was a bit of a switch for us from, you know, we just need to support more families, bigger houses, more units, more buildings.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:24:22] Which is the standard way your brain would go.

Krista Flint: [00:24:24] Yeah. And there's days that I still think, Oh God, wouldn't it be nice to have like a huge... But when I think about it, I think the magic that is Highbanks is hard to replicate if you're serving 150 families. You know, it's very difficult for this magic that we do with families on a daily basis, it's hard to replicate that. And then durability. Are we hiring for succession planning? Are we imagining times in which, you know, other communities, other sectors could be influenced by us? And are we doing things in a financially sustainable and responsible way that says - I mean, as I say, like the fundraising is a hustle, it's a constant pressure - but are we doing things like setting up reserve funds? Are we doing, Covid was tough. You know, we posted our first deficit in 20 years for one of the years of Covid. I'm happy to say that we've come through it. But not every organization in the city has. And the need for us is increased so much, so significantly during and since Covid because of the mental health cost that we're only starting to understand now. So that's, for me those are the three sort of areas - that impact, scale, and durability - is what I try to think about every day when I try to get to that view from 60,000ft, which is not easy.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:25:44] It's high.

Krista Flint: [00:25:46] It's way up there.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:25:47] It's really high. This has been so lovely. I have been so inspired by the work that you're doing at Highbanks. I feel like I've learned so much about impact being not traditionally what we thought it would be and the different ways. So thank you for sharing your story and the work Highbanks is doing and for joining us today.

Krista Flint: [00:26:08] Not at all. I was so happy to be here. Thank you so much, Mel.

Melanie Nicholson: [00:26:14] Impact, scale, durability, those three things I think all of us can incorporate in some way, shape or form. So happy to have Krista on the podcast today. Thank you for listening. Please like, subscribe and consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Catch you next time on It's a Theory.