Chapter Affiliate Spotlight: The Suzuki Association of Ontario

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Suzuki Association chapter affiliates take the SAA’s regional messages home with them, bringing our philosophy and goals to their local community of teachers, students, and parents. In this series, we highlight the work of chapter affiliate leaders.

Debbie Hammond is the chair of the Suzuki Association of Ontario board. She began studying violin at four years old in London, Ontario and went on to complete a Bachelor of Music in Performance degree from the University of Toronto and a Master of Music in Performance from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. After teaching with the Suzuki String School of Guelph and the National Capital Suzuki School of Music, Debbie is now the creative director of the Hammond Suzuki Studio.

I know that Ontario is still very much in lockdown right now. What has it been like to navigate that, and how have you kept your chapter strong?

In some ways, it’s actually made a couple of things a little bit easier for us. Ontario is such a big province to start with, so being able to have our meetings entirely online means that nobody has to drive anywhere, which has been really helpful. We had an extra board meeting this year in February because we were able to do it online, which was great because it enabled us to move some really important policy and procedures forward so that we could build up the strength in our organization.

One of the goals of the executive team right now is to keep building procedures so that no one person becomes irreplaceable. We want to make sure that whoever comes into the job has all the tools they need to really be an effective leader. So we’re working hard to do that right now. This has been our main focus and a good thing to work on while everybody’s kind of stationary and idle. That’s the big part of what we’ve been doing.

Lockdown has been hard. Our members have taken some time to write some thoughtful contributions for the newsletter, which have been really well received. That’s been an amazing byproduct of everybody trying to cope in lockdown, sharing some new ideas.

Other than that, online tools are making a lot of things possible that maybe weren’t possible before. A lot of things that we kept saying, “oh, someday we’ll do that” became “okay, somehow we have to do this right now.” So, that’s really sped up a lot of online projects for us which has been great.

Although it’s such a sad time, it sounds like there’s been a lot of movement in your chapter.

We’re very lucky that the previous executive team did a lot of work to start the process of modernizing a lot of things. We were just at the right moment where we were ready to give everything a big hard shove into trying to make things a little bit more modernized. It’s been kind of cool to be able to push forward with that work.

What are the benefits to joining your chapter?

We work hard to connect teachers to other teachers. As I mentioned, we deal with an extremely large geographic area. For example, I live in Ottawa, Ontario, and the treasurer on the executive team is about 500 kilometers away from me. And that’s only halfway across the province. Because we deal with a huge geography, we work hard to try and find ways to connect everyone together. The opportunity to talk with all of the teachers and connect on some level through the newsletters or participating in board work is really important to all of us. We missed our annual conference this year. Because of the COVID-19 situation, we weren’t able to stage any kind of in-person production and we weren’t quite ready to attempt an online something. So we’re looking forward to being able to draw everyone together online in November.

We’re also really proud of our scholarship program. We’ve worked hard to build up financial stability so that we’re able to offer support for teachers to continue training and learning and being exposed to as many different Suzuki communities as possible because that’s how we grow and develop new ideas. We’re excited that we’ve now added a dedicated scholarship for a new teacher who’s embarking on their very first Unit One class. This scholarship is a larger dollar amount to help offset that cost because those courses are more expensive. The second part of our scholarship program is little bursaries that we have for teachers who would like to collaborate with other teachers or other studios in their community around them. We’re happy to help sponsor the cost of any cross studio events as well to try and build up more community connections with our members. We also help provide instrument insurance because the SAA insurance is not available in Canada. It’s excellent coverage at a good price.

I know you’re excited about planning for the fall conference. Talk to me about where you are in the planning stage, and how you organize something like that.

In a lot of ways, it’s very similar to organizing an in-person conference, except that you don’t have to deal with the rental stuff. I’m very fortunate that our board has a few members who had their schools host online workshops during the year. We’ve been able to draw a lot of their technical expertise on issues and roadblocks that came up, so we’re hoping that will help us to run a smooth production in November. We are excited to welcome a slate of clinicians, including Mark Mutter, Sally Gross, Carmen Evans, Myra Yeung, and Nicole Wilton. We’re also excited to have Martin Ruttiman from the European Suzuki association deliver the keynote address on our teacher day. There will be instruments specific sessions following. All the clinicians are in place and the registration is open. We’re very excited to have that started already, and looking forward to continuing with the process. So we’ll see where it goes from there.

What conversations is your chapter having around diversity and inclusion right now?

In the spring last year, the previous executive team committed to taking action in diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility education for our board and extending to our members. We went forward with a training session with Marva Wisdom, a DEIA clinician from Guelph, Ontario for the full board in December. It was an excellent session talking about the mindset of inclusivity. It was meant to help our organization gain a common language and a common understanding. The most important thing that came from that session for me was that this is a journey in that you’re always going to be learning things and you’re always going to be experiencing things and thinking about things and no two people are ever going to be in the same place. Marva’s big statement was, “you can’t know what you don’t know.” So you just pick up what you can, learn what you can, and keep moving forward. That’s all anybody can do.

We also hosted a session in February as part of a new series our chapter created called the SAO: TEA. The TEA stands for teaching, education, and action. We piloted this idea in the summer because everybody was a little confused and worried about COVID-19 safety protocols and teaching lessons. So we had a session with a registered nurse to talk about the most updated public health advice and give studio teachers guidelines on how to be safe in an in-person environment. In February, we used this series to present a discussion information session by two Suzuki program graduates, Sador and Alador Bereketab. They were talking about the Suzuki experience as racialized students in a Canadian program. What they had to tell us was amazing, talking about ways you can make things more accessible, how to interact with the community effectively, and draw people in so that you can build a welcoming and inviting community in your studio. They are two truly remarkable young women and I look forward to seeing how they’re going to change the world one day because they will. It was really a great session and we were excited to see so many of our SAO members there and also wider SAA membership. We had members who joined us from three or four different states for that event, which was something to celebrate.

Is there anything else that you’d like to highlight?

We’re planning a couple more SAO: TEA events in August and in February. We’re looking at a variety of topics for those. The online conference is coming up in November, and until then, we’re just going to keep working away at all of our policies and procedures and setting up to keep our chapter strong for years to come.