COMMITTED TO LEARNING & GROWING TO BETTER OURSELVES For much of 2020, the pandemic and international health crisis has taken center stage. It is an understatement to say that the impact of the pandemic will be felt for many years to come, and some of those changes are likely to stay with us forever. That said, when I look back on the past year, the events that stand out more poignantly for myself are the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent wave of protests that followed. While the pandemic has shifted my view on many things, the increasing calls for meaningful social change and the stories behind those calls have caused me to deeply reexamine my view of the world. I have experienced racism only once in my life, and even then, only as a brief and passing encounter. Having grown up in Vancouver, a gateway city for Asian immigrants into Canada, I was a visible minority but never felt like one. Therefore, as a child, I perceived racism as being something largely of the past, and, to the extent that it was a current issue, it occurred elsewhere and on a limited basis. As I grow older, it has become more obvious that racial injustice is not as much of a rearview issue as I grew up believing. As the events over the summer drove me to seek out more information about the history of racial injustice in Canada, the US and around the world, the magnitude of the current day challenges that remain to be addressed began to dawn on me. While overt racism may not be as prevalent today as in the past (and I recognize that even this is debatable), it seems clear that unconscious and systemic racial injustice are still very significant problems today. And it is in overcoming these forms of racial injustice that I believe the larger challenge exists for us all. While overt racism is easily identifiable and can be resolved by appealing to an individual’s compassion and accountability, overcoming unconscious and systemic racial injustice will require an appeal to our collective compassion and accountability, as no one person is directly responsible for the entirety of this wrongness or its damaging legacy.
I am incredibly grateful to be part of both an organization and a group of colleagues who recognize and are similarly dedicated to meeting this collective obligation. Thank you to everyone for your commitment to learning and continuous growth to better ourselves, Venterra and the world in 2021. I look forward to the new year and all the opportunities and possibilities ahead of us.
CALVIN LEE-YOUNG
Experience Leader, Vice President of Finance Venterra Corporate Office Employee since 2004
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, OUR PEOPLE
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D I V E R S I T Y, E Q U I T Y, & I N C L U S I O N
I have always understood that I have been very fortunate in my life; fortunate to be raised in a good and loving family and blessed to have received good guidance which resulted in good decisions. But, as I begin to comprehend the scale of my “iceberg of ignorance” as it relates to racial injustice, I have come to understand my good fortune in a different light. Not only was I fortunate to be raised in a good and loving family, but I have been immensely fortunate that it was not taken from me by order or decree. Not only was I fortunate to have been guided toward good decisions, but I have been immeasurably lucky that my bad decisions have not been excessively punished by a dispassionate system. As I continue down my own path of education and understanding of racial injustice, I increasingly recognize the obligation that I think we all have to correct our injustices of the past.