Kitchen table advocacy

Picture a kitchen table. Imagine the sensations of being together- the smells of home cooked food, the taste of familiar flavours, the sounds of laughter and conversation, the moments to pause and remember those who aren’t present, the introductions of someone new. And, perhaps more often then we like to remember, the disagreements and impasses that sometimes make those memories feel impossible today, as we reflect on conversations we no longer feel we can have or spaces that seem to longer exist.  

This is of course a metaphor, but please do pull up a chair, as I share three lessons we have learned over the last 50 years of advocacy centred on peacemaking and how that work has changed us and changed Canada. 

In 1979, headlines were filled with news of refugees fleeing the Vietnam War. MCC supporters wrote to MCC asking what they could do to tangibly help. Bill Janzen, the first director of our tiny office in Ottawa, was tasked by the board of MCC to come up with a solution. Together with a host of civil servants, Bill sat down and crafted an agreement that allowed private citizens to host refugees for a year when they first arrived in Canada. What we later learned was that the public servants first invited showed up ready to hinder progress, with no intent of arriving at an outcome. However, MCC’s earnest and collaborative approach changed the tone, and therefore outcomes of the meetings, resulting in private refugee sponsorship. Today, almost every community across Canada has had the joy of experiencing the transformation that comes with welcoming a stranger to their table.  Not only has this program benefited millions of newcomers, it has also fundamentally changed the way Canadians understand what it means to welcome. Rather than being naïve, showing up assuming the best of others and treating them from that perspective deeply shapes the conversation and then the outcomes at the table 

In 1989, then-Conservative foreign minister Joe Clark was interested in having informal conversation with Palestinian leaders as Canada contemplated recognizing Palestinians’ right to self-determination. Those leaders were cautious about a formal meeting with the Canadian government. However, MCC representatives Kent and Linda Stucky were able to use their relationship with those leaders and invited everyone to a meeting at the MCC office in East Jerusalem. Over a homemade cake, the Canadian government took, in Joe Clark’s own words, “an essential step leading to Canada’s decision to formally recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination. That was an important development in Canadian foreign policy, which may well not have happened without the good offices of the Mennonite Central Committee.” 

MCC continues to join with supporters to do relational advocacy, based on baking. For example, supporters in Ontario have been baking bread and taking it to MP meetings in the Niagara region, advocating for Canadian policy to support buns, not bombs. Here in Ottawa, in October 2024, we took our current MCC reps to meet with policymakers over Gaza, complete with homemade cookies, to continue the legacy of meeting over food to disarm tensions and start conversation. This type of work, showing up in ways that allows us to see each other as humans with dignity, shapes change. 

For decades, across Canada, MCC has engaged in relationship building with Indigenous communities. Through that work, MCC and Mennonites have been forced to wrestle with complexity and complicity, from learning about the impacts of Mennonite migration on Indigenous displacement, to even, in some areas, participation in the 60s scoop. While uncomfortable, we have committed to remaining at the table, even when we couldn’t sometimes see the outcome. 

However, in 2018, thousands of MCC supporters, participants in this collective learning, sent letters to senators, asking for passage of bill C-262, a private member’s bill to enshrine the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in law. The passing of the bill was largely seen as hopeless when it was first introduced into the House of Commons. However, advocacy, led by Indigenous lawmakers, working with Mennonites and many others, pushed the bill through the House of Commons and into the Senate. As an election loomed, MCC encouraged Canadians to use the tool on our website to send letters in support of the bill to the Senate, where C-262 was stuck. Enough letters arrived that there was public debate in the Senate about the role of Mennonites in Canada, between two Mennonites with opposing viewpoints, a rare occasion to see our advocacy in action. And while the bill didn’t pass, due to a federal election, there was enough momentum that the incoming government was able to create new legislation that successfully enshrined the UN Declaration into Canadian law. 

Most of us have a desire to make a difference in the direction of human dignity, to come to the tables. We face daunting challenges, in these uncertain moments of global crisis.  

Yet the lessons I draw from these examples, also forged in moments of crisis, is the importance of connecting with people as people, arriving with good intentions, listening through discomfort to the calls for justice, and believing that the solutions and steps forward will emerge in ways we never dreamt of, as we come together. It’s the power of applying peacemaking, in our diplomacy, in our policy creation, in our laws, and in the way we treat each other, not a naïve desire for good feelings or the absence of conflict, but the hard work of dialogue and allowing something new to emerge from those very spaces where we don’t agree with each other but see a change that needs to happen. 

As we think about the next 50 years, we don’t know what will happen, but we know that the answers are found in the work we do, together, around the table. We look forward to continuing to work together to make peace more than a wish.  

Reflection and action questions.