Senior Policy Fellow
Human Early Learning Partnership

Canada: British Columbia Hub | NORTH AMERICA

Joanne Schroeder is a settler on the traditional territories of the K’omoks People on Vancouver Island, Canada. She is a mother of four and grandmother of three. She is most joyful when in a coastal rainforest or amongst her tomato plants.

Joanne is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP). HELP is an interdisciplinary research network based at the University of British Columbia. HELP’s unique partnership brings together many scientific viewpoints to address child development issues, with a focus of ensuring that research is translated to community and policy action.

Joanne’s current work is focused on emerging, with her colleagues at HELP, an approach to building compassionate systems leadership in the child serving systems in British Columbia.

Joanne has been a member of the HELP team for nearly two decades. She previously served as Deputy Director and was the initial lead for HELP’s knowledge translation activities. She was the Provincial Advisor to “Children First,” a community development project that worked in forty-five B.C. communities and was the National Lead Fellow for the Canadian Council for Early Child Development.

Joanne’s appointment as Senior Policy Fellow is a natural extension of her passion for and career long commitment to building better systems and policies for children and youth, through leveraging innovative practice, community leadership and research. The emerging Systems Leadership Centre at HELP will explore, demonstrate and share a new model of systems work that will build on the successes seen in communities throughout Canada.

Joanne participated in the Systems Leadership Institute in Aptos, at which time she realized the alignment between the teachings of Mette Miriam Böll, Peter Senge and Robert Hanig and the work that was being considered in British Columbia. She and her co-facilitator Pippa Rowcliffe have built on these learnings and adapted them to their context to develop and deliver a Compassionate Systems Leadership approach in B.C.

Joanne sees the Certification Program for Compassionate Systems Master Practitioners as a rich opportunity to deepen her learning, to work with colleagues in B.C. who are building this approach in the education system, and to contribute to the emergence of an international network for change.