Haley Hartos - Changemaker Profile
Haley Hartos (she/her) is a Mount Royal University Alumni. In this Changemaker Profile, she shares her education and career journey, starting off in Journalism to her current role as a Strategist at the City of Calgary. Her work encompasses the breadth of changemaking - community care, incremental change, and leaving things better than she found them. Haley touches on her experiences as a former student at Mount Royal, including her formative changemaking experiences on campus.
Could you tell me about yourself?
It feels right to start talking about how I started at Mount Royal University. I started off at MRU in the Journalism program, and that's actually how I started my career course. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. I thought I wanted to write about political issues, contentious issues, and bring an eye to the issues that were happening globally. By the time I got to my third year, I started sort of shifting how I thought about that work. I thought there were some really tangible skills I was learning through that program, but I was inspired to do something versus write about things. I think there's such a critical piece around journalists calling out systems. But I thought, maybe I had a role in actioning what some of those solutions could be instead of just writing about them.
While I was in university, I was working with one of my professors, Sean Holman. He's in the Journalism faculty and we were exploring my hometown as there had been a cluster of suicides - seven suicides, seven young men. Sean asked me “Can we talk about what policy interventions might be appropriate when this maybe speaks to a broader issue?” As we were writing that story, my best friend died by suicide, which totally changed the course of my life and how I wanted to write about issues. So, as I was finishing my university education, I thought “I need to put this story on hold and think about other ways that me and my community, back in Red Deer, can make change.” There was a startup - The Smiles through Lindsay Foundation - and we raised a ton of money within that first year to start breaking ground on some Central Alberta Children’s Advocacy Centre. This experience really solidified for me that I wanted to come back for a fifth year and transition to having a minor in Social Innovation and Nonprofit Management to learn some tangible skills in which I could enact out in the community.
From there, I trickled into nonprofit communication space and building programs at the Women’s Resource Centre, which was the intersection of those things. Afterwards, I pursued my Master's in Social Work, and while at first glance it didn’t seem complementary with my journalism degree, it made so much sense in the way that we were talking about issues - using platforms to give people voice in the systems that we operate.
I loved working in community - I supported adult education programs, community food initiatives and moonlighted writing grant applications for non-profit organizations and grassroots groups before I took a role at the City of Calgary that allowed me to create equity frameworks for funding for all sorts of groups in the realm of mental health, addiction, and community safety - including targeted opportunities for racialized and other equity deserving groups.
Currently, I am work in the City’s Chief Administrators office at the City of Calgary. It’s a very interesting place to be at the City, to be a Strategist, and really think about “what are the biggest issues and opportunities for us?”
What does it mean to you, to be a changemaker?
To be a changemaker is to be an actor. One of the ways I view myself is somebody willing to throw spaghetti at the wall until something sticks - to be willing to act as you're moving through the space. To be a changemaker is also somebody that's brave enough to acknowledge that there's an issue to begin with, which I think is half the battle. To be able to name that something's not working, particularly when that's been the status quo. A changemaker is brave enough to iterate solutions, create something that's incrementally better.
What big, beautiful question drives your work?
The first question is always “How do I leave this even slightly better than I found it?” Every new role I come into I ask - “How do I make this a little bit more equitable?” Again, it's being brave enough to ask “is this working?” which, when you're new in a role, feels very brave. To call out a system, whether it's an IT issue or I'm noticing there's racism embedded in a process, to name that there's something wrong - that drives my work.
Another question I ask is “How can I influence the energy in the room?” Particularly when I'm not somebody that's charged with making critical decisions. There's something to be said about how you show up in a space when you aren’t in a leadership position, you still have influence as the worker bee. It's important that people feel empowered in their workspaces, to be able to name the issues.
How do you see changemaking happening at Mount Royal University?
While at Mount Royal, I would always describe the Social Innovation program as “the business program with a heart.” I felt that it was embedded in social value and virtue. It asks hard questions, like “How do you become the change?”
I think that there's a lot of programs [at MRU] to call people in, even if they don't attend the university. I know the Banff Systems Summit is approaching and there are some other really cool programs to call in community groups to keep them engaged with the institution and to give students the opportunity to meet professionals. Also, there is a lived application of what you're learning in class, whether that's working with community groups or case studies, I think MRU was really hitting the mark with those pieces.
Was there a defining changemaking moment for you as a student at MRU?
I had a very cool opportunity under Patti Derbyshire, she is a faculty member at MRU. While I was in her class, we noticed an uptick in Islamophobia on campus. We had the opportunity to navigate the rise in hate as part of a US State Department's Call to Action for post-secondary institutions. My colleague and I did this project where we interviewed Muslim students and non-Muslim students and took their photos in black and white. We created a display in the library which had a narrative, it seemed like the folks [we interviewed] were talking with each other. As you walked through the display the audio would follow you. It was like one big conversation between Muslim and non-Muslim students and staff talking about the things they're experiencing - misconceptions and otherwise. The interesting part about that project was that it was quite collaborative across the class and it was recognized internationally. I think that project gave us space to bring activism into the tools that we were learning about and it was really a once in a lifetime project. Also, it gave us the opportunity to engage in candid conversations, and feel empowered and brave enough to do that.