Senior Coordinating Council – “Building a Shared Understanding as a Foundation for Organizational Response to Racism.” – 2026

Senior Coordinating Council – “Building a Shared Understanding as a Foundation for Organizational Response to Racism.” – 2026

Scoping Statement & Strategic Alignment

The Seniors Coordinating Council and the Centre for Race and Culture apply a systems change lens to support partner organizations in improving the effectiveness, equity, and cultural sensitivity of services for racialized and diverse seniors. By fostering shared learning and cross-sector integration, this collaboration directly aligns with CFRAC’s mandate to embed anti-racism within organizational governance and daily practice, helping institutions build accessible, trusted, and culturally safe systems of care.

Key Activities

This initiative convened staff from across all levels of Edmonton’s senior-serving sector to establish a foundational, sector-wide response to racism and build deep intercultural competence. Grounded in a systems change approach, the training focused on dismantling individual, institutional, and structural racism within senior care, equipping organizations to remove systemic barriers so that racialized seniors can safely access services, feel supported, and age well in community. Through this 6 hour training, the staff were able engaged in the following:

  • Systems-Level Anti-Racism Training: Interactive learning sessions examining the root causes of systemic and structural racism within senior service delivery.
  • Cultural Framework Analysis: Utilizing analytical tools such as the Iceberg Model of Culture and the Culture Map to examine underlying organizational assumptions, cultural dynamics, and workplace norms.
  • Reflective Group Dialogue: Facilitated group reflections designed to identify practical transition pathways toward equitable, culturally sensitive, and barrier-free service delivery.
Group brainstorming around what a transformed system would look like in the Senior-serving sector.

Learnings from the Project

Collaborative discussions and collective brainstorming surfaced five essential insights for organizations serving racialized seniors: true transformation requires internal cultural shifts just as much as structural reform, and explicitly addressing power dynamics is foundational rather than optional. Participants recognized that intentional slowness and deep reflection are vital strategic capacities for anti-racism work. Furthermore, agencies must intentionally design feedback loops to disrupt harmful assumptions, while maintaining policy flexibility that allows teams to be responsive to diverse community needs without compromising core purpose.

Further Exploration

Building on the relationships and trust established during this gathering, participating agencies and staff will continue cross-sector dialogues to shift their collective service delivery models. Future work will focus on turning these shared insights into coordinated operational changes, collaborative practices, and long-term systemic responses to racism across Edmonton’s senior-serving ecosystem.