Legal path leads to helping women of Yemen

“I came from a family farm where the name on the barn was my father’s, my grandfather’s… you get the picture…” However, hers was a family that was “open to the possibility that I might want to do something that was different from what they did.”

Kennedy-Glans trained as a lawyer – she graduated from Western Law in 1984 – and her career trajectory evolved from law to corporate negotiations for Nexen, Inc., the large Canadian-based energy company that brought her to the Middle East in the first place. “I became a negotiator, and then I became responsible for above-ground risk management. In the energy sector, that’s community. What are your social accountabilities?

“What I [did was] stand in that space and try to get them all to one table and
try to sort out the right questions they want to dig into, and strengthen those
relationships.”

 

So she doesn’t see that it was a big transition in 2001 to leave the corporate world (where she was Nexen’s first female vice president) but continue to develop the capacity building work she had started while working for Nexen in Yemen. In 2003, she founded Bridges Social Development (www.canadabridges.com), a volunteer organization that trains and mentors community leaders – both women and men – in health care, education, journalism, politics and law.

 

 

Leaving Nexen allowed her to work more independently with a broader range of organizations, including non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups, who were trying to figure out what constructive engagement really looked like. “That wasn’t a big step out for me, because it was just applying the learning in a different space.”

“My work’s been ‘boots on the ground,’ and I think that’s where I learned a lot. I think that whole idea of making sure that there is true alignment between a head office strategy or a government policy and what’s happening on the ground is everything.” She’s passionate as she talks about what she does, and about the importance of integrity, the subject of her first book (Corporate Integrity: A Toolkit for Managing Beyond Compliance) in her corporate and current work.

 

(Photos by Patrick McCloskey -  http://www.mccloskeyproductions.com)

 

 

“What does [integrity] look like? Whether it’s gender integrity or organizational integrity or personal integrity – what do you intend, what do you commit to do, and what do you actually do? It sounds very simple, but I think it’s an essential piece when we’re across the table from somebody else and you’re talking about a tough dilemma. You’ve got to be able to say, ‘This is my intention, here are my commitments, and here are my actions.’”

 

Facilitating capacity building – bringing volunteer doctors, nurses and midwives, teachers, lawyers and judges, journalists, and politicians from the west to share and exchange expertise and insight with their professional counterparts in Yemen – has been, for the most part, rewarding. Kennedy-Glans enthusiastically calls it, “quite wonderful.” Then she pauses and corrects herself: “…until recently, it’s been quite wonderful.” Until recently, when al-Qaeda forces spread into Yemen.

 

“I struggled so much, dealing with the fact that a small group of people, hateful people, could disrupt a society so greatly… the impacts on the ground in a place like Yemen are absolutely shocking. I know a lot of people in a place like Yemen – I know them as friends, I know them as colleagues, I respect them, I admire the work they do. Watching what happened to them was devastating for me personally,” and was the catalyst for her second book, Unveiling the Breath: One woman’s journey into understanding Islam and gender equality. “I was writing because I had to deal with my response to those issues.”

So what keeps her, and the volunteers of Bridges, going?

“I’ve seen change. I have seen citizen leaders do amazing things. I believe that people can lead positive change through individual acts. You need government policy, and I think organizations, like companies, need to have strategies and visions that people can see and decide – or not – to participate in, but I think we often underestimate the gentle, small actions that take place within individuals.”

 

“And even though things can look a little bleak at times, what gives me the most hope in a place like Yemen, in a place like Canada, is people. People. Human capacity. It’s what we don’t spend enough energy on. Forget oil capacity, look at your human capacity.” She laughs when she adds, “They didn’t teach me that at law school, by the way.”

 

Kennedy-Glans’ newest project is Unveiling Youth Potential (www. unveilingyouthpotential.com), a program set in motion by Yemeni youth who came to Bridges when they saw al-Qaeda in their country nearly two years ago. Working with these young people, and other youth from Canada and around the world, they facilitated 18 months of conversation about what outsiders can do to support at-risk youth in isolated communities. “It’s very exciting,” Kennedy-Glans says, but adds that the program is still growing, and there are many ways for new people to get involved. “We need mentors, we need support, we need funding, we need learning coaches, we need people who are committed to working with youth leaders who can be agents of positive social change in the communities where they live.”

And from there, perhaps it’s just a few steps until you’re talking to a president…