Amrit Ahluwalia (Western University) on Building Systems of Belonging for Lifelong Learners

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Amrit Ahluwalia to discuss the critical shift from access to belonging and the redesign of orientation for adult learners.

Transcript

Shauna Cox (00:02):

Amrit. Welcome back to the Illumination Podcast.

Amrit Ahluwalia (00:05):

Hi, Shuana, how are you doing?

Shauna Cox (00:07):

I am so good to be chatting with you today. We're going to be looking at creating systems of belongings for lifelong learners, which I think is right up your alley. So let's just dive into the conversation. Going to kick it off with how can CE divisions play a national leadership role in shifting access to belonging, especially for these adult learners who are entering programs coming this fall?

Amrit Ahluwalia (00:30):

Yeah, I mean, well, it's an interesting divide, right? This question of do we want to focus on access? Do we want to focus on belonging? Is there such a thing as focusing on both? And I think we've historically thought about belonging and access as effectively two sides of the same coin, but I think they come from foundationally different places. So when you're focusing on access, your focus is on addressing a deficit, right? So when we're focusing on access, we're saying, well, we don't have enough post-secondary access. There's not enough pathways to post-secondary education for underserved folks. There's not enough pathways to education for folks that aren't necessarily looking for a full-time degree experience. So we're going to create space for people, but it's only addressing one component of the issue that they're trying to solve. Belonging shifts the focus to a success mindset. So I think the focus on belonging is something that I think is possibly more important.

(01:30):

Access is a first step, but I think access is a component or a condition of belonging, whereas access as a standalone goal, all you're doing is creating space and hoping for the best. So I think when we start talking about belonging, we're starting to talk about activities that are going to drive persistence. They're going to drive success, they're going to drive retention through the program itself, but also lifelong retention. So ideally, when we're in the continuing ed world, we're thinking in terms of to be crass, customer lifetime value. So we're thinking in terms of how many times can we bring this individual back in order to continue to serve them over the course of their lifetime in order to continue providing them pathways or opportunities or experiences that are going to help them further their career. So belonging is building an affinity that I think is a really important condition of access, whereas access in and of itself, it's almost like you're opening a door and then hoping for the best. You're opening the door and saying, well, what happens now is up to you.

(02:38):

So anyway, I think it's a really interesting divide in talking about access and belonging. And frankly, I think continuing ed divisions are really well suited to start to execute this transition towards belonging for themselves, but also for their institutions because frankly, from a programmatic perspective, we're access oriented. As a rule, our programming is highly flexible. Our programming addresses a lot of the obstacles people have to accessing education, whether that's a modality, whether that's scheduling, whether that's price point, whether that's relevance. Our programming in and of itself is access oriented. So we're already starting to take these steps towards a more belonging oriented environment, but also our financial structure just requires creativity in how we engage learners. Again, for a continuing ed division, it's not enough to say, Hey, we opened the door. You did with that experience what you will, and now every five years you're going to come back to campus and get really, really drunk and watch a football game and give us money. We can't operate that way. And I think more and more we're seeing post-secondary institutions writ large recognizing that the relationship they maintain with their learners over time needs to evolve. But I think we can execute a lot of that just from our standard approach to how we engage our learners and how we reengage those learners.

Shauna Cox (04:03):

And I like the dovetailing off of access and belonging, this front, opening the front door mentality. I want to paint the bigger picture because we all know that there's 40 plus million, now I'm hearing it's 50 plus over 50 million adults with some college no degree. All of these, this newer demographic of adult learners who are coming into the institution. But when you look at this onboarding orientation, you immediately think of the 18 to 22-year-old. You think of frosh week and all of these other things around a young person and what they're going to do. But from a CE side of thing and the reality of more adult learners coming into the space, what makes the orientation or onboarding experience different for a lifelong learner in CE compared to that traditional undergraduate program? And then how can institutions, as this demographic keeps coming in, how can they adapt to kind of fit that experience better for

Amrit Ahluwalia (05:07):

Serving all these different

Shauna Cox (05:08):

Audiences? Exactly.

Amrit Ahluwalia (05:09):

Yeah, it's interesting, right? The reality of it is for a lot of non-traditional students, education is not their core focus.

(05:17):

So we have a post-secondary ecosystem that's designed to serve a recent high school graduate who's very high achieving, who plans to do sort of a four year experience where they're living on or near campus, and their exclusive focus is on their education. Now, that's what the system was built for over the last 30 years, certainly. But over the last 50 or 60 years, broadly, we know multiple institutions have made significant changes to address far more diverse populations. But at its core, that's what our infrastructure was built for. So a lot of what we're doing is iterating from there. The reality of it is, yeah, our students have jobs, our students have childcare responsibilities. Our students have parental care responsibilities. Our students are trying to figure out how to make the most of this investment that they're making in themselves. So their concerns, the questions that they have about their educational experience are foundationally different than what an 18-year-old who's trying to sort of discover this sort of next version of themselves, what that individual is trying to solve.

(06:35):

These are both totally valid approaches to orientation, and they're both totally valid series of challenges that people are trying to address. The point here is that we've recognized a one size fits all approach to programming doesn't necessarily work, but we still try to adopt a lot of the same standards for service regardless of the learners that we're serving. And so as a result, there are some individuals who are very well-served and some individuals who don't really see themselves in the service array that's offered to them by their institutions. And that starts with orientation. It really starts with this idea of are we providing you answers to the questions and are we providing you visibility into the realities of your college experience that suit your needs for where you are at and what you're trying to accomplish? I will say one other thing. You raised the point about adults with some college and no degree, and I absolutely think this is a challenge we need to address, but at the same time, I also think when we have that conversation, we tend to underplay the reality that for many students, education is a means to an end, not necessarily something that they're pursuing for a sense of personal growth and development.

(07:51):

And for many students, the degree isn't necessarily the be all and end all of what they're trying to achieve. Now, that is not a universal statement by any means, but I remember years ago working with Kathy Sandin, who's now the president at CSU East Bay when she was in Alaska, and she was tackling this exact question of how do we understand student success? And she highlighted a framework called the student achievement matrix, which is basically the SAM model is designed to think about student success through the lens of whether that student achieved the thing they set out to achieve when they enrolled. So we use completion as a proxy for student success, but that's based on the assumption that a student had the same outcome in mind that we have for them, which is earning a degree. For some students, and this is especially prevalent in MOOCs, for some students, they wanted one piece of information that lives in one part of a degree program.

(08:48):

Once they got that piece of information and could apply it to the place they wanted to apply it, they step out and do that thing. For some students, they wanted maybe an introduction to a certain field so that they could qualify for a job in that field. So this is where I think starting to get more realistic about the things students are trying to achieve, which also should be part of the orientation, and then thinking about our credentialing ecosystem to more granularly provide access to credentials that are relevant to students at points in time that allow them to achieve the goals they're setting out to achieve. That's why I think that's really important,

Speaker 3 (09:22):

And

Amrit Ahluwalia (09:23):

That's a place where, by the way, apologies to the listener, this is so off topic, but I think this is one of those things that becomes really, really important when we're starting to imagine a post-secondary environment that's designed for diverse student audiences is in trying to build a service array and a programmatic array that's not designed to fit all students into a single box. Our recognition that we need to be more diverse in the way that we recognize learning and reward learning and award credentials and recognize achievement needs to be more student-centric than it is today.

Shauna Cox (09:57):

Well, I think it's not completely off topic. I think we're kind of threading a needle here because ultimately what we're talking about is this student first mindset, which is so critical to be putting yourself in when you're looking at these various components, as you mentioned with the degree, honestly, that part of the completion or the degree or the tangible thing is putting a bow on it from a higher ed side of things. But to the student, it definitely looks very different depending on who the learner is. Now, talking about what the learner wants as outcomes, what they're looking for, what do you see as the most important elements for making orientation or that early engagement actually meaningful for a lifelong learner?

Amrit Ahluwalia (10:38):

Oh, for sure. Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, it's relevance. Everything we do needs to justify the time it takes for the student to do the thing. So if we're asking them to be on campus for a day, or if we're asking them to sit through an information session, if we need to ensure that we're able to justify that usage of time on the student's terms and that I'm not downplaying how much of a challenge that can be because we're asking people, our staff members to really consider why we do the things that we do, as opposed to just thinking about what we do or how we've always done things.

(11:25):

So one change we made here at Western, so for our post-degree programs, which are one year credit bearing programs that are designed to help recent undergraduates find a pathway to a career, so it's basically the equivalent of a post-baccalaureate credential or a postgraduate credential. It's a one year program, it has a three month practicum, and these programs are open to international students as well as the domestic students. The orientation for these was really complicated. There was a huge information package that went out, and what we found was that a lot of people were calling in asking the same questions over and over and over again. That wasn't information that was previously provided to them, and it was a huge burden. So our post-degree team and our communications team work together to create a really straightforward and streamlined email flow paired with a really effective website experience, paired with a really effective onsite orientation for when the students actually arrived.

(12:27):

And that three-step process basically created an orientation ecosystem that met the students where they were at every stage of their pre-arrival needs. It provided them the information they needed, but in a format that wasn't overwhelming, and then ensure they were actually ready to engage with the onsite orientation. So they had the background information they needed for the more in-depth information they were getting when they were on onsite. That more student-centric approach to just sharing and relating information came from an openness from this team to saying, well, we've always done things a certain way, but it's clearly not working. So basically I think relevance is paramount and making sure that we're able to justify the time that our learners are sharing with us for the orientation, having multiple pathways of sharing information so that we're able to get these key points across through different modalities, through different channels, and in many cases, repeating critical information and not just assuming people have seen it because sent it or said it.

(13:31):

And then third is community building. And I think this is something that we all understand to be important in the continuing ed world, but because of the relevance thing and because of how stretched so many of our learners are, community building can often take a backseat, but community building and having a sense of community and a sense of belonging is one of these things that's going to drive persistence and success. We know that great online learning is only considered great when you have really effective peer to instructor communication and peer-to-peer communication and trying to create that sense of collaboration, that sense of community within incoming classes, within incoming cohorts and among professional development learners who may just be doing sporadic courses here and there is critical to their success and to their feeling of affinity to the institution. So I think community building is a third component of a really effective orientation experience that in the lifelong learning space, we tend not to pay that much attention to. But that is really important.

Shauna Cox (14:34):

Yeah, exactly. And I think I want to bridge some of the points that you made together because there's this idea, community building, and often when you think of orientation, I'm going to go off of the stereotype, it's just playing games and that type of thing that does community build, but it's a very one and done transactional experience

Amrit Ahluwalia (14:54):

And also for a very specific audience.

Shauna Cox (14:56):

Exactly. If

Amrit Ahluwalia (14:57):

You want a 30 5-year-old doing a pass the bucket game, don't get me wrong, maybe they're up for it, but I think if they're going to take an entire day away from their kids and away from their job to orient to the institution, playing a game isn't necessarily the thing that's going to help build that relationship.

Shauna Cox (15:16):

Exactly. And that orientation is the starting point to that student journey, and there was the point that you made about, with the example you provided with the points to the pathways. Oftentimes when students are coming to the institution, I'd say probably the number one outcome is so that they can do better in their job, get a new job, upskill, reskill, things like that. So how can the CE orientation experience reflect those broader priorities like workforce development, economic growth, while still remaining personal human-centered student first mindset?

Amrit Ahluwalia (15:52):

Absolutely. I mean, I think it's a matter of combining what really works in traditional orientations with things that really work in engaging the learners that we're actually serving.

(16:03):

So things that are unique, we need to create some connection between the students and industry leaders and the employers in our region. The employers in our region want to be engaged with these kinds of offerings. And ideally from our perspective, we want employers in our region to know that we're a place to come for relevant workforce oriented upskilling and reskilling programming because there are prospects for corporate training. So we want active engagement with our employers and with our industry partners across our region, and bringing them into an orientation experience is a really great space for them to get a feel for the kind of work we do and the kind of people we serve. So I think there's a lot of win-win benefits, in fact, win-win win benefits to having employers engaged in the orientation experience. It's again, it speaks to the relevance for the learner.

(16:56):

It builds a relationship between the division and the employer, and ideally it connects employers to prospective hires that they could be looking at to address certain skills gaps they might have. The other thing is alumni engagement. We need to be, first of all, we need to actually engage our alumni just as continuing ed divisions. That's something we need to take more seriously. So we should be bringing in alumni who've been successful with our programming to give incoming students a sense of what's possible. It's all part of this broader thing when we're talking about persistence, success, building affinity with the institution to understand that there's people who've done this before and who've been successful, and to have a sense of what success might look like. So I think involving alumni in orientation activities for lifelong learning and professional development is really, really important. But again, not something we really do because we tend not to think of our past learners as our alumni.

(17:57):

Now, in terms of the things that would be the same, highlighting and sharing what key services and supports are available to our students, it, it's interesting. Again now in our division we have non-credit and credit programming. Our non-credit students aren't technically students of the institution, so they don't have access to some of the services, they don't have access to some of the resources of the campus, but our credit bearing students do. But are we taking them to the library? Are we showing them the mental health support services that are available to them? Are we taking them to the gym? Do they know that they have access to the campus and what the campus provides? I don't think so. And as a result, we tend to replicate a lot of services that actually already exist on campus here in the continuing ed division, which is inefficient and expensive, and also not necessarily predicated on best practice. So introducing people to the campus, introducing them to key services and supports that are available to them, and then going almost exactly against what I said five seconds ago, having some kind of structured activity available that starts to build affinity with the institution and with other students, but maybe in a less infantile way.

(19:16):

So we're playing around with this right now. I certainly don't have the answers. I just know that this is something we're trying to tackle, starting to look at. Western is unique in the Canadian market in that we actually have a pretty robust campus culture, especially around our campus sports. And that's no shade to any of my colleagues across the rest of the country. It's just that, and I myself am a Queens grad, but the reality of it is basically Queens Western and probably St. FX actually have residential campus cultures that are built around sports. So why don't we engage our students in that culture? Why aren't we taking them to football games? Why aren't we having continuing studies at the hockey night or hockey night continuing studies? I dunno, there's branding opportunities here, but the point is, what are the things that we're doing that actually tie our students into the things that the campus is known for, but in a way that's relevant to them so that we're able to build opportunities for them to build connections with one another outside of the classroom and at the same time build a sense of affinity between them, our division and the institution writ large.

(20:30):

Something really interesting that our new vice president Advancement said to me when she first started. Now many of my colleagues in continuing ed can relate to the fact that there can sometimes be a tenuous relationship between advancement and continuing education, typically because from the continuing ed side, we're always asking for contact lists, and from the advancement side, they want to make sure that their relationship and communication with alumni is streamlined. So I totally understand that. I completely relate to it. And coming from a marketing background, you never want to create a complex messaging tree with an individual. You want them to have a clear sense of how their relationship with an organization is supposed to evolve. So my question to her was how do we build stronger relationships with our alumni? How do we actually create an alumni culture in continuing ed? Because if you look across, I talked about our post-degree programs earlier. Almost every major organization in London has multiple people who came to them initially from a co-op placement from our post-degree programs and now work there.

Speaker 3 (21:34):

The

Amrit Ahluwalia (21:34):

Person who leads our manufacturing wing of the London Economic Development Corporation joined the LEDC from our post-degree program. But typically speaking, these individuals don't think of themselves or affiliate themselves with our division because we put no work into that. And that was exactly the comment from my colleague in advancement. She said, well, okay, you want to build alumni relationships. What do you do to build nostalgia? What do you do to actually create an environment that people reflect on fondly? Is it transactional, it's just there to do the program and leave, or are you actually doing something designed to build a community and to build a culture and to build an experience that they're going to reflect on fondly? And what's interesting is I think a lot of our students try to do this themselves. So they have their WhatsApp, they have their group chats, they have all these different tools that they use to engage one another, but that is separate from us. We're not facilitating

Shauna Cox (22:35):

It. Oh, association.

Amrit Ahluwalia (22:36):

That's it. And I think that starts at orientation. It starts with their introduction to our world being oriented around this idea of community and collaboration and an environment where they're really welcome and where they're really supported. So again, very, very long tangent. Apologies to the listener, but it does come back to a similar theme, which is if you want something, do it. And I think we have struggled with that in continuing ed because we're basically, we are an investment and ROI oriented shop. We have to justify every single penny. And the value of an investment won't pay off for maybe five or 10 years. It can be harder to justify spending a little bit of extra orientation for the potential of a better relationship with an alumni in five to 10 years, but it might be worth it.

Shauna Cox (23:29):

Absolutely. And I'm going to take a step back for a second, possibly throw a curve ball answered if you'd like, but I'm just genuinely curious, when you mentioned not to discredit the non-credit students, which kind of sounds ironic, but how do you create that sense of belonging for those students? Aren't a quote, aren't a part of the institution to make them feel still more than just a number, but still feel a part of the institution even though they may not have all that access to those services?

Amrit Ahluwalia (23:57):

Yeah, I mean, it's a foundational problem, and it's not specific to us. This is basically every continuing ed shop at every college and well, probably every university across North America and at many of our colleges as well will have a similar issue where, because our non-credit students aren't paying auxiliary fees, they're not paying. So, and I think that's reasonable. By the way, access to these services does require you to chip in for

(24:30):

'em. And if you're not chipping in for them, if you're paying for a $700 course, that's not enough to fund the salary of the mental health workers that are accessible. Now, I'm sure if someone's in crisis, they will help, but the reality of it is we're not making some of these services available to students because the rates that they're paying are pure tuition rates. They're not tuition and fees. So as a starting point, I'm not as militant, or sorry, I'm not as passionate as some of my colleagues about the status of our non-credit students, but I do believe that we have a responsibility to ensure that those students are cared for, that they're supported, and that they feel affinity to the institution even if they aren't formally students of the institution. So that's our responsibility. If we're going to bring in 4,000 non-credit students a year, it's up to us to make sure that they're supported and that they have access to services and resources and that they are able to build these closer relationships with the institution.

(25:42):

So I don't necessarily think that that's problematic. I just think it's something we need to focus on. So now what's interesting, our students aren't all necessarily within an hour and a half of our campus, we serve students in Vancouver and Calgary and Whitehorse. These are all places that many of our listeners won't know about. Sorry. So we're in southwestern Ontario, we're close to Detroit, and we're serving students that span the entire continent and Canada for those unfamiliar with our geography. It's about a five hour flight to get from the middle of the country where we are to the west coast of the country, and it's about a four and a half hour flight to get from the middle of the country to the east coast of the country. So we serve students from coast to coast. So what that means is that it's not necessarily feasible for us to have onsite community building for every single student we serve, but that doesn't mean we can't do something virtually.

(26:38):

That doesn't mean we can't host virtual fireside chats where we're bringing employers together to talk about things that are important in their industries and inviting our students to attend them. That doesn't mean that we can't do virtual activities, whatever those might be. Companies use this as a technique to manage employee satisfaction all the time, and these many companies are operating totally remotely. So how can we learn from some of those best practices while at the same time for the students that are in our community, again, why can't we have a day where we take everyone out to a football game or to a hockey game or to a volleyball game, or why can't we host a drinks night at a bar downtown? I think there's a lot of things that we can do designed to build community, both virtually and in person so that students feel a relationship with the institution where right now it's just not something we're prioritizing, but coming from this perspective of are we trying to do access or are we trying to do belonging? It's a really important consideration as to how we think about our investments and how we think about our retention

Shauna Cox (27:43):

Strategy. And I love this overall idea of building affinity because I think that is truly key to any higher ed institution, no matter what department you're in, because need this, we need that sense of belonging community and for a student to feel way more than just a number because they're not. They are real human beings with lives, personalities, all these great things with the idea of building affinity, and I think especially from the CE side of things, employers are really important. That idea of the employer partners. How do regional, or in your case, provincial considerations like the labor market needs or the different learner demographics shape your approach to building the belonging at the very start of a CE journey?

Amrit Ahluwalia (28:29):

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So every business kind of has to address this one question of who do we serve? Why do we serve them, and for what purpose or with what product do we serve? And I think that's the same question we need to ask ourselves in answer to your question. So regional and provincial considerations, the needs of our labor market, either within the fields that we serve, because they're institutional expertise areas or within the needs of our community in terms of the employers that we have relationships with, will guide our programmatic decisions. Those programmatic decisions will guide our marketing choices around who we're trying to engage and what kinds of students we're trying to bring in the door, and then how we structure our services and our orientation models will base themselves around the people that we're trying to serve, the reason that we're trying to serve them, and the challenges that they're having to overcome to be served by us.

(29:25):

So I think it's kind of a core question about strategy, and it's why trying to be everything to everyone can be really problematic. It's why access orientation as a rule can be more challenging if all you're trying to do is open the door as widely as possible, but you don't, that doesn't necessarily leave you the capacity to have the services, to have the supports, to have all these pieces in place to make sure that once students come in, you're able to address their needs. So I think if we're coming at this from a more strategic perspective of being clearer about who we're trying to serve with, what we're trying to serve them and what they're overcoming in order to be served, it positions us well to design orientation and engagement activities and structures that really support those individuals and ensure that they have the greatest opportunity for success.

Shauna Cox (30:17):

And then leaning on this strategic direction that we're going in, what role do you see CE playing in supporting their countries, or in your case, Canada's goal around lifelong learning, this economic inclusion innovation? And then how does that start? As start currently as we're recording, we are in July. This is going to release out in August as we're approaching the fall time.

Amrit Ahluwalia (30:44):

Yeah, exactly. Well, and I think it's interesting, we obviously have some in Ontario and Canada, for those of you who are familiar with our legislative ecosystem. So basically just by way of quick refresher, in 2019 or 2018, our provincial government slashed all tuition and fees of post-secondary domestic tuition and fees for all post-secondary institutions by 10% and froze now 2025.

(31:14):

So what that meant is many institutions wound up orienting themselves towards finding pathways to serve the global market, because that's unregulated from a tuition and fees perspective. And those individuals, that market would allow the institutions to continue to operate and continue to keep their doors open and keep programming diverse in lieu of domestic students' capacity to support the operations of institutions. Now, we are public institutions, we're taxpayer funded, so we have a responsibility to serve domestic audiences, but we also have a responsibility to find ways to keep our lights on. So serving international audiences was the pathway that many Canadian institutions chose to address, or certainly in Ontario chose to address that gap. What that led to is certainly some bad activity from some actors in our space, maybe an over delivery of programs that don't necessarily have strong outcomes, a focus on bringing in students who weren't necessarily academically ready for programming and who maybe didn't have the financial means to support themselves during or after their programs didn't even necessarily have the financial means to get back home again. So we were looking at post-secondary programming as a pathway to immigration status, but with some actors leveraging programming that didn't suit that end. So the federal government initiated a cap on international students in the last year to manage this immigration flow. But as a result, it's left post-secondary institutions, especially in Ontario, really struggling to find ways to keep the lights on. Many, almost every university in Ontario is running an operational deficit.

(33:08):

So coming back to the question, how to continuing ed division support candidate's goals around its life and learning around its economic activity, economic inclusion, first of all, I think that there's a responsibility for the federal government to look at how we're instituting these caps. There are numerous institutions that we're offering programming that's of extremely high quality that are being caught in the same policy design, which was structured to remove or reduce the impact of bad actors. As a result, we're not creating the necessary flows of immigrants into the Canadian economy that are necessary to keep our economy moving. So that's one challenge. Now, on the other side, continuing ed divisions have a tremendous opportunity here to create pathways for students that are domestic and underserved to access programming that is of high quality to maybe achieve a level of socioeconomic development or socioeconomic barrier breaking that might not have been otherwise available to 'em.

(34:13):

So I think we have an opportunity to more robustly serve domestic audiences and to create pathways to economic prosperity for folks that might be underserved or unserved. But at the same time, there's a real missing link here around how we are building the global workforce that for 200 some years, Canada has relied on to drive its economic growth. So I think there's a both end angle to this conversation, but I think continuing ed divisions can certainly support the achievement of Canada's lifelong learning and economic development goals in a few different ways. But some of that relies on our provincial and federal governments maybe having a broader recognition of the work that continuing ed divisions actually do.

Shauna Cox (35:02):

I feel like we all need to take a deep breath after that. It feels a little heavy, but it's the reality, and I think there is, I appreciate you looking at the opportunity side of things. So I'm just going to throw in something a little more lighter of first, we're talking about these creating systems of belongings for lifelong learners. Some institutions may have figured it out, some may have not even started. Do you have any advice or anything you want to add when we're talking about creating these systems, creating that affinity for the institution and its learners? Anything that I may have missed?

Amrit Ahluwalia (35:35):

No, for sure. Well, yeah, we ran a gamut of topics there from how do we take students to a hockey game to the economic crisis that's going to swallow us all? And we're keeping it light. We're keeping it light here. No, I think at its core, belonging is a choice

(35:55):

From us as continuing ed leaders, as practitioners in our space, as leaders in our space, we have a responsibility to decide that we care about belonging. We have a responsibility to decide that we care about relationships with our previous learners. We have a responsibility to decide that this is a priority for us. Access is a deficit mindset solution. It's a pathway to solve a problem of our own making, and that's very important. But at the same time, belonging positions us to solve that problem in a more meaningful way. But it's a thing we have to decide that we're going to focus on. It's not enough just to open the door and say, well have at it.

(36:42):

We have to build the structures that are going to support people's success in a more sort of cohesive and meaningful way. So I would say belonging is a choice, and it's a choice that I think all of us are passionate about. We're not in this space for no reason. Most of the folks that are working continuing ed are here because we actually care about these things. So I think it's for all of us, it's a decision that we're going to really focus on some of that work because it will and it does, and it will make a difference.

Shauna Cox (37:14):

Absolutely. And you know what else we're passionate about? We love food on this podcast.

Speaker 3 (37:21):

We do love food on this

Shauna Cox (37:22):

Podcast for sharing all those insights. But I think another important question to ask you specifically, you have been many places around Canada, the states, and we've had many recommendations from you in terms of a restaurant recommendation. So this is a open-ended wild card. You get to choose whatever city you'd like. If someone is going to, if insert town here, where do they need to go?

Amrit Ahluwalia (37:47):

If someone's going somewhere, where do they need to eat? So I appreciate that at this point. I've said Pizzeria Madre in London so many times that you don't want to hear it again. And I respect that. Although if someone is in London, Ontario, go to Pizzeria Madre, it's phenomenal. Now

Shauna Cox (38:04):

Are they paying you

Amrit Ahluwalia (38:05):

That you'd think

Shauna Cox (38:08):

Brand ambassador

Amrit Ahluwalia (38:10):

The place to go? If you are traveling to San Diego, California,

(38:15):

You have to go to Lola 55. Lola 55 is an unbelievable taco spot. It's my good friend EDA Beta at uc. San Diego took me there, geez, nearly 10 years ago now. And Ed at the time, wasn't necessarily known for restaurant recommendations. I believe Spaghetti Factory was one of the places he really liked, and Pickle Barrel when he was in Toronto was a place he really liked. So it didn't have hugely high hopes from this recommendation, but we went and it is truly, it's one of the best meals I've ever had. Every time I'm back in San Diego, I go to Lola 55. It is consistently excellent. So if you are in San Diego, you have to go to Lola 55. You will not regret it.

Shauna Cox (39:10):

Amazing. I love it. And shout out to Ed because clearly that has changed your perspective, and maybe he does have better recommendations now.

Amrit Ahluwalia (39:17):

In fairness, every restaurant recommendation he's given recently has been tremendous. So

Shauna Cox (39:22):

There you

Amrit Ahluwalia (39:22):

Go. Shout out to Ed.

Shauna Cox (39:24):

We love Ed. Awesome. Amazing. Amer, thank you again so much for joining me. I really appreciate your conversation.

Amrit Ahluwalia (39:30):

Absolutely. Thanks, Shauna.