When the community objects to your hiring

In October 2019, community opposition forced Peterborough’s New Canadians Centre to publicly defend hiring Andy Cragg as its Executive Director. 

After a transformative period in charge, that seems like a long time ago.

“There’s a very real element of this role that is public facing and for the community, accountability beyond just the board, staff and clients,” said Cragg. 

“I did agree with some of the criticism and not all of the arguments from my side … it probably did hold me back from saying things.”

“He was the best candidate,” said NCC’s Director of Client Services, Marisa Kaczmarczyk.

“His commitment to immigration was quite vast. Not only in volunteering, but his studies in immigration. … He’s very knowledgeable in an applied, useful way.”

Under Cragg’s stewardship, the centre’s staff numbers have more than doubled, its yearly intake of new clients has continued to rise, and it serves an increasingly large number of people each year. NCC has ramped up its community development work and established dedicated youth programming, which includes a young leaders council. It also recently bought its building.

“He’s always had a lifelong passion and desire to see this community be what it could be,” said Yvonne Lai, Director of Community Development. “He was part of a sponsorship group and had been working with NCC for years before taking on this position.

“It felt unfair that one can do all these things and be willing to leverage your privilege to help newcomers, to just be logged at, ‘well, you’re not a newcomer’. He handled it with a lot of humility.”

As Kaczmarczyk and Lai saw, Cragg acknowledged his privilege and has always tried to leverage it for the benefit of NCC, clients and staff. 

“What I’ve learned is that newcomers appreciate the fact that you step into a role helping a group you have no obvious stake in. Can only newcomers help newcomers?”

Cragg said recognizing and leveraging his privileged position allowed him to talk about the nuances of newcomer experience — from hate crimes to microaggressions — to specific audiences who might not have otherwise heard it. 

Lai says she’s seen Cragg do a lot of work to lift the voices of newcomers as leaders. He puts staff in a position where they can be seen as knowledgeable, she says. 

Such is NCC’s transformation under Cragg that many of the team do not know an NCC without him. Which is why the staff were stunned into silence in March when he told them he’d be stepping down this summer to spend more time with his family.

“Nobody expected it. I think everyone needed a moment to process it,” said Mauricio Interiano, NCC’s Community Engagement Officer. “But everyone was very happy for him for making this positive decision for him and his family.”

“I’d been aiming towards this since day one,” Cragg said. “I was always planning for the point of leaving.”

That attitude encapsulates Cragg’s approach to leadership, one that he frames as a bias towards action; do and iterate. 

“Andy is a problem solver but not a micromanager. He has always had a vision. ‘We can get there.’ He made things happen while he was here,” said Kaczmarczyk.

And then, the COVID-19 pandemic

The pandemic would soon become Cragg’s next big challenge. Joining NCC from a virtual work environment, Cragg said he didn’t feel daunted and saw no reason they couldn’t “collaborate … and connect to each other and do effective work.”

“The organization was poised to grow … standing on the shoulders of the previous executive director Hajni [Hos] and interim executive director Jason Stabler. I walked into basically the beginning of five years of guaranteed core funding from the federal government. They had done the legwork.”

The virtual COVID-era work environment soon evolved to a blended hybrid model that benefited clients and employees. Lai said this format during the pandemic “expanded the ways we reached people that we couldn’t have before.”

“A core thing within our life skills programming is digital literacy. [COVID-19] became an opportunity that opened up a gap we can do something with.”

For staff, the hybrid working environment provided flexibility and autonomy. 

“Everyone here is motivated by the mission and their piece of that,” he said. It was therefore important to make sure staff were supported and that “their roles didn’t take over their lives.” 

Interiano said he has appreciated Cragg’s engagement with staff.

“He really made an effort to have a relationship with every member of staff. He holds quarterly meetings with everyone individually and delivers messages through email, audio and video so people can receive them in the way they prefer.

“The way he did things like this is something I’ll definitely take away with me.”

As Cragg prepares to leave the organization, many of the goals he had for NCC have been achieved, like placing community development on an equal footing with client services and refining people’s jobs so they can be more focused on their core roles. 

Even as the five-year period of federal funding comes to an end, he said NCC’s in a good place funding-wise.

“I’m really proud of where the organization is. We’re reaching an economies of scale where things start to get easier.”

But just as Cragg has overseen NCC’s evolution, the man himself seems to have experienced one as well. 

“I came in with a lot of confidence and I don’t know why I should have felt that way,” he said. “You have intense self-doubt and impostor syndrome on one hand and hubris on the other. How do I make sure I am doing the right things?

“But you get used to being a decision machine. Your role is often to make a decision when others can’t. I have seen and experienced the value of experience … to understand and not avoid risk.”

For other EDs, Cragg’s advice is simple: “Keep pushing. There’s always more that can be done.”

As much as anything, Kaczmarczyk emphasizes that “part of his impact, part of his legacy is the idea of possibility. He set us up to do the work in an expanded, deeper way.” 

Lai echoes this: “In balancing federal priorities and translating that into a sense of optimism … he could have gone down the road of pessimism, but he moved from that narrative of need to a narrative of possibility.

“Bad things are just going to constantly happen. How do we translate that into a narrative of transformative change?”

According to Kaczmarczyk, this meant that while they heard of other centres issuing layoff notices and then rehiring people through Covid and funding fluctuations, “Andy made sure we didn’t go through anything that was not absolutely necessary.”

Cragg’s message to staff that day in March was reportedly candid and emotional, reflecting his commitment to being open with people.

“He has a real dedication to transparency. When you say ‘is there something I’ll miss about him?’, I’ll think about him standing in front of staff and talking about issues. He wants people to understand and he thinks that people should know things.

“There are not too many people that dedicated to transparency.”

Cragg has a capacity to exceed expectations, whether that’s the way he, as Youth Worker Lubna Sadek said, pronounces the guttural qaf sound in Arabic perfectly, or his mastery of the saxophone and the banjo. “He’s a really good musician!” enthuses Lai. 

For a man who spent the past few years trying to create space for others to speak, perhaps it is appropriate he doesn’t have the last word on his departure, either.

“I’m really grateful for the chance to work with him,” she said. “I would give Laura, his partner, and his kids real kudos for being his inspiration and for sharing him with us.

“I know they inspire him to continue to build this community.”

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