Newfoundland and Labrador’s Vital Signs: Portrait of a Foundation-University Partnership

Vital Signs, a national program of Community Foundations of Canada, produces annual reports of the same name that examine the quality of life using statistics on fundamental social issues. With these reports, community foundations are able to present a comprehensive and balanced picture of well-being in their communities. The Vital Signs report for Newfoundland and Labrador is produced in partnership between the Community Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development, a university research unit with expertise in both promoting community-based research and making academic information accessible to the general public. This article examines the origins of this collaboration and the lessons that have been learned from it, and discusses how the report addresses a need for community knowledge in Newfoundland and Labrador

Outport “Girls in Service”: Newfoundland in the 1920s and 1930s

Interviews with former domestic servants as well as published memoirs provide a glimpse into the backgrounds, work lives, and migration patterns of young Newfoundland women who worked in service in St. John’s and smaller communities during the 1920s and 1930s. Migration from outport communities into domestic service work was a common experience for young women with few other options. “Girls in service” found positions not only in the homes of the wealthy but also in middle class and some skilled working class households. Domestics reported a sense of “difference” from their employers and engaged in a variety of strategies to resist exploitation.À partir d’entrevues réalisées auprès d’anciennes employées domestiques ainsi que de mémoires publiés, cet article donne une idée des origines, de la vie active et des caractéristiques de migration de jeunes Terre-Neuviennes qui furent en service à St. John’s et dans de plus petites localités pendant les années 1920 et 1930. Chez les jeunes femmes de petits villages isolés, qui avaient peu d’autres options, c’était une expérience courante de devoir migrer pour s’engager comme domestiques. Les « filles engagées » trouvaient du travail non seulement dans les maisons des bien nantis, mais aussi dans des maisons de classe moyenne ou chez des travailleurs spécialisés. Les domestiques rapportèrent que leur employeur leur faisait sentir une «  différence  » entre eux et s’engagèrent dans diverses stratégies pour résister à l’exploitation

“A grim and costly business” the mechanization, modernization, and decline of pulpwood logging in central Newfoundland

Between 1907 and 1927 the seasonal foray into the “lumberwoods” to harvest pulpwood for the Grand Falls and Corner Brook newsprint mills became an entrenched part of outport life in many Newfoundland communities. After World War Two, stabilized and growing markets for newsprint meant that thousands of rural Newfoundland men found work harvesting and delivering pulpwood. Beginning in the 1950s, mechanization and modernization dramatically reduced the labour requirements of Newfoundland’s pulpwood industry, creating a “corps of professional loggers” that constituted a fraction of the workers employed previously. In the 1950s, the Grand Falls mill’s importance to the province’s economy meant that few imagined that it would ever close. However, when the mill closure came in 2009 it did not have a catastrophic impact on the economy of central Newfoundland. This was due to a fifty-year decline in the economic importance of the pulp and paper, and pulpwood industry in Newfoundland. By 2009 more jobs had been lost in the preceding four decades than were lost by the complete closure of the mill. Had the closure of the mill occurred forty or fifty years previous, because of the dependence on the pulp and paper industry and the much larger number of jobs at stake, the region would have been economically devastated. The long-term impacts of mechanization and modernization meant that the deindustrialization of central Newfoundland was a slow process with an abrupt ending. For those loggers that remained after the mechanization efforts of the 1950s and 1960s, the process of mechanization did not stop, nor did the challenges faced in supplying the Grand Falls pulp and paper mill with wood. Using archival materials, company newsletters, local newspapers, and oral history, this thesis examines central Newfoundland’s loggers, the changing nature of their work, and how mechanization dramatically reduced their numbers ultimately diminishing the economic importance of the pulpwood harvest to the provincial economy

Atlantic Advocate, vol. 51, no. 04 (December 1960)

Range: vol. 47, no. 1 (September 1956) - vol. 82, no. 5 (January 1992) only.Running from September 1952 to January 1992, the Atlantic Advocate published news and other material about Atlantic Canada. By the end of the 1950s it had absorbed both the Atlantic Guardian and the Maritime Advocate and Busy East. (Christine M. Brown, "Atlantic Advocate," Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, vol. 1, p. 86.

Intertwined: the leadership development of A. Job Halfyard - One educator's social history narrative account of educational and community leadership development in rural Newfoundland (1949-1987)

What do Raymond Williams, Paulo Freire, Philip Warren, Herb Kitchen, and my research subject, A. Job Halfyard, have in common? They were male children of the Great Depression born in the 1920s and early 1930s. They lived through some of the most traumatic events of the first half of the 20th century at a most vulnerable stage of their lives. As adolescents, they had the opportunity to attend universities, a privilege once only awarded to the elite. They studied Marxist thought. They came to understand that politics is power, that intellectual knowledge—education—provided possibilities for new directions in life. They had reached a ‘turning point.’ They became socialist in their philosophy, values, and viewpoints. They listened, debated, and expressed opinions. They learned to become ‘actors’ and ‘change agents’ in a traditional institutional system that shaped their lives, their culture. They joined modern organizations. They became part of movements in their quest for a more just, equitable, and humane society. They encouraged experimentation and new ways of looking at the world. They became leaders who mentored and taught others. But Halfyard lived his goals and vision in one small corner of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) as an ordinary, obscure, and unsung foot soldier who had the ‘call to serve’ reflective of so many others of his generation. Through this case study of A. Job Halfyard, who taught in rural ‘outport’ Newfoundland for nearly 35 years from 1949 to 1987, I also explore factors that may have contributed to the leadership development of other educators in rural NL. During these post-Confederation years, the role of education was to prepare young people to take their place in a rapidly changing, increasingly industrialized, and more urban-centred society (Atlantic Development Board, 1969, p. vii). Using social history narrative and drawing from aspects of oral history, life histories, autoethnography, and visual auto/biography narrative inquiry methods, I examine the emergence of educational and community leadership identities—how and why so many teachers of that generation became leaders in outlying rural areas of the province (Giddens, 1991; p. 126; Sugrue, 2005, p. 10). My aim is to record and chart the institutional, community, personal factors and conditions that influenced the leadership development of teachers like Halfyard. My ultimate goal is to document some of those significant contributing influences to better understand the role of educators in post-Confederation Newfoundland. This study also provides insight into the alternative practices and policies envisioned within the educational landscape from 1949 to 1987. It was a time when the ‘welfare state’ ideology reigned supreme, a time when the social and economic well-being of all citizens was a paramount focus of governments. During this time, more professionally trained teachers were being groomed to assume rural leadership roles traditionally held by merchant families and church officials. They were given autonomy and inspired to adopt practices to meet the specific needs of the students and families in the rural places where they taught. This decentralized place-based educational approach would change with the introduction of the neo-liberal economic model of the late 1980s and the massive out-migration of rural populations to urban centres. Yet, their lessons and their approaches have currency today as rural communities struggle to sustain themselves in light of ongoing economic development pressures