About Tahnia Getson
Tahnia Getson has been working in nonprofits, advocacy and social change for the better part of ten years. They are an active part of the Grande Prairie and surrounding community and have been integrated into the arts scene for most of their adult life. They are constantly seeking out new education about the society that we live in, and are eager to have a better understanding of the community with each passing day.
In 2022, Tahnia was selected as a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for their work in the community. They were selected based on their extensive work researching and targeting systemic inequities that were preventing youth from accessing resources while on their academic and work oriented journeys. In 2023, Tahnia was selected as the Young Womxn of Influence in the Grande Prairie and surrounding area for their continued work in the community.
Tahnia is an energetic part of NWPSA and brings extended knowledge on systemic barriers, effective advocacy and activism, non profit structures and an extensive knowledge on dinosaurs. They are eager to learn something new daily and strive to grow in the work that they do every year.
Connect with Tahnia Getson: Email | Instagram | Linkedin | Facebook
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Resources Mentioned
The Transcript
**Please note that all of our transcriptions come from rev.com and are 80% accurate. We’re grateful for the robots that make this possible and realize that it’s not a perfect process.
Sam Demma
Welcome back to another episode of the High Performing Educator Podcast. This is your host and speaker, Sam Demma. Today I have the pleasure of introducing and welcoming a very special guest to the show, Tahnia Getson. They are the Executive Director of the NWPSA. Tahnia, thank you very much for taking the time.
Sam Demma
Please take a moment to introduce yourself.
Tahnia Getson
Thanks so much for having me. We actually refer to the NWPSA in-house as NWPSA, so that’s probably what you’ll hear me say, mostly because it’s way more fun to say that way. And breaking it down in the acronym, honestly, just takes more fun or more time. It’s less fun than just saying NWPSA. So I’ve been the Executive Director here with NWPSA going on 4 years now and somehow it feels like the beat of an eyelash in 85 years all at once. I say all the time that I love the work that I do and I love the job that I have, and I can’t imagine trading it in. It’s been an absolute delight working with students year in and year out, being able to bring them in and mentor them and figure out where it is that they want to go and being the person who gets to help them get there. And so I’m really happy to be here, and I’m happy to be in the position that I am, working with, I’d like to say young minds, but it’s not just young minds. We get students of all ages and all brain developments, and yeah, it’s just an exciting job.
Sam Demma
What do you love most about the work that you get to do every single day?
Tahnia Getson
I think the thing that brings me the most joy is that it’s never the same. Every student that you meet with has a different idea of where they’re going in the world and what they’re seeing in the world. And the fact that you’re always working with different perspectives is really refreshing. We live in this world where everybody has a different vantage point and a different perspective on even just one problem. And so the fact that you get to look at the exact same problem with so many different perspectives is refreshing. And so nothing is ever stale. And that brings its own challenges, like the fact that you perpetually have different boards and you perpetually have, you know, different voices at the table has its own challenges. But I think that when you accept that it’s never going to be exactly the same and you are always going to have changes in front of you, it’s really refreshing and exciting. And I think that that’s my favorite part: it’s never going to be stagnant, it’s never going to be stale, and you always have a learning opportunity in front of you.
Sam Demma
The sign behind your desk could not be more true.
Tahnia Getson
“Chaos Coordinator.” I joke all the time. I’ve been trying to petition my board to change my title. Executive Director is a very fancy job title, and the work that I do, I never got into for the job title or the paycheck. When you work in non-profits, you kind of know that you’re not in it for the money. And I have a firm belief that money’s made up, which is a whole thing that we talk about all the time. And so I keep joking that my job title should really be Chaos Coordinator or Chaos Enabler.
Tahnia Getson
And that sign actually came just last year at our awards ceremony. They managed to find it somewhere—I can’t remember where—and they gifted it to me at the awards ceremony. And so now it’s officially behind my desk. And we do have a label maker in the office. And so we made a little label, and it’s above my nameplate outside my office as well. So it says, “Chaos Enabler, Executive Director.” And so it’s quite funny.
Sam Demma
I love that.
Sam Demma
I noticed it and wanted to ask or better understand where it came from.
Tahnia Getson
Yeah, it came from my team.
Sam Demma
You mentioned that in the nonprofit space, people are typically driven by impact, not by monetary means or gains. Did you know when you were growing up that you wanted to work in the nonprofit space or more specifically with a student association? Or what journey in your own life brought you here?
Tahnia Getson
No, not at all. When I was very young—honestly, when I was five—I wanted to grow up to be a dinosaur. And so it turns out that wasn’t actually a practical career path. You couldn’t actually grow up to be a dinosaur, so that didn’t work out for me, unfortunately. And then for a little while, I think I wanted to be a lawyer. That also didn’t work out for me. Desk jobs weren’t really my forte. And I thought that I was going to be a teacher for a little while.
Tahnia Getson
And so there were a lot of really practical career paths that I wanted to do when I was younger. And then what actually wound up happening is, when I was 18, I started teaching an out-of-school theater program. And I found a lot of love in my youth in the fine arts. And when I started going to post-secondary, I found a lot of love in the fine arts. And so officially my degrees—and I do have a few of them—are actually all in the fine arts.
Tahnia Getson
So I have a performance diploma as well as a visual arts diploma. And then my bachelor’s is actually in theater arts as well as psychology. And that was always a weird mix for people. Like, I was having this conversation yesterday with somebody, and they were like, “That’s a weird mix.” And I was like, “When you start breaking it down, it’s really not.” Because one of the things that I learned so much about when I was looking at theater is that when you’re reading a play and when you’re looking at a play, what you’re actually doing is you’re looking at the world through somebody else’s eyes.
Tahnia Getson
And you’re effectively studying someone else’s psyche while looking at a conflict, because the arts all came out of periods of political unrest. And we look at music, and we look at visual arts, and we look at workers’ union theater, and that all came from a point of trying to push social movements forward. And so I started working with these young minds, and I thought of how cool it was that these young minds were starting to experience their own voices in the arts world.
Tahnia Getson
And that was such an impactful place for me to be, working with all of these young minds who were starting to experience their own identity and finding it in the arts. And that’s actually what shifted a lot of the work that I did with youth. And so as I was exploring that, and I was exploring that through psychology and the way that the world worked, I kind of started to find that love in nonprofit work.
Tahnia Getson
And so then I did graduate with my Bachelor of Arts from the University of Lethbridge, actually. And then immediately after graduating, I went to work with a grassroots movement that works specifically with youth on identifying and researching systemic barriers that were preventing them from graduating from secondary school—so high school—and moving on to post-secondary and the workforce, and what it was that was stopping them from being able to access those resources.
Tahnia Getson
And so I did that work for a couple of years and found a lot of passion in that. And then from there, I became the Executive Director of the Students’ Association. And funnily enough, there was a point in my time where I had run for student leadership while attending GPRC, which is actually the school that I’m the Executive Director of now.
Tahnia Getson
They just did a rebrand, so now it’s Northwestern Polytechnic. And I think that I was 19 when I did that, and I did not get elected. I was not successful in any way, shape, or form in that. I think that I actually came in last in the election. But I didn’t have a really firm idea of who I was at that time. And I think it was a really good learning lesson for me.
Tahnia Getson
And somewhere in that very long-winded journey that I just talked about, I realized that part of that process was that I hadn’t seen people like myself in leadership. I hadn’t seen anybody that I felt represented who I was as a person. And when I was working with all of those youth who weren’t moving on to post-secondary or the workforce, I was seeing that they were seeing the same things—that they weren’t seeing themselves reflected in leadership for, you know, a lot of reasons associated with systemic marginalization.
Tahnia Getson
And so that became the driver. That became the “why” for me: there needs to be more people in those positions that are driving that bus forward to make space.
Sam Demma
You are inspiring so many people, most of whom you may not even have a conversation with on a day-to-day basis. I think it is so important that you allow that to continue to fuel the reason that you show up. Did you have your own challenges with education as a student growing up, which has inspired you to work to change some of those things? Or was it a later realization in your life, as you described?
Tahnia Getson
It was a little bit of both.
Tahnia Getson
I’m going to take a second to self-position just because I didn’t do that yet. I am a queer non-binary activist, and so I do a lot of that work in the community. And I often position myself—I am neurodivergent, I do have a chronic illness, and all of those things. And they all kind of compound onto each other. And I did have a little bit of a rough childhood in terms of family upbringing and stuff like that. I am the first person in my family who went to post-secondary and graduated.
Tahnia Getson
And so in terms of all of those things—when you don’t have that in your household, you don’t have people to help you navigate those systems. And so I had to navigate a lot of those systems on my own. And, you know, being in the academic world, this became really apparent for me. I am in the process of getting my master’s degree right now. And it became really apparent when I was researching my master’s program that academics can be a little hierarchical.
Tahnia Getson
And if you don’t have someone to help you navigate that process, you don’t really know where to go. The undergraduate degree was a little bit easier because you had access to high school counselors to help you navigate that process. But the graduate degree program was a lot more difficult because it’s almost like it’s kept behind a gate, and you have to find a back way in there.
Tahnia Getson
And so if you don’t have people at home who have done a master’s program, you have no idea how to find a supervisor, how to write a letter of intent. And so I had to navigate that whole system by myself. In order to do that, I was emailing all of my prior professors being like, “Where do you even find these people?” Because there are all these secret rules that they don’t tell you about.
Tahnia Getson
And so, yeah, for myself, I was like, “I don’t even know where to begin on half of this.” And so if I was facing it—and I’m a really determined person—I knew with the way that I grew up and the way that my identity compounded on each other that if I was facing that, there are so many other people who are facing that.
Tahnia Getson
Because I’m very fortunate in the fact that I am white, and so the color of my skin has never impacted how that’s prevented me from having access to rooms or spaces. And so I can see all of those things compounding on top of each other and how that prevents people from accessing these other areas. And so it’s so frustrating to me that these areas where you’re supposed to grow and have access to, in air quotations—because I know we’re not going to see my video and I’m a hand talker—to “better yourself” and get the leg up, how there are still so many gates.
Tahnia Getson
And so for me, yes, some of those pieces of my identity came later, and some of the ways that they compounded on themselves—the self-actualization—came later. But they were obviously all there from the beginning. Access to resources, I didn’t have. Like, I didn’t find out that I was neurodivergent until I was 28 years old. And so I didn’t have access to resources to help me earlier on. And so I kind of just navigated them all on my own.
Tahnia Getson
And being in a space now where I can advocate for that earlier for students and help other students learn how to navigate for other students, I think is really impactful. Because it’s not about me going out and doing the work. It’s not my job. I’m not the face of the Students’ Association. It’s about helping these other students learn how to not only empower themselves but to empower students around them to be able to go out and do that. And I think that’s what’s fresh about it—it’s not about me. And I never wanted it to be about me.
Tahnia Getson
I wanted it to be about community and coming together as a community and learning as a collective on how to do that.
Sam Demma
One thing that resonated with me was that your entire career or life, once you started working, has been about supporting and helping young minds. And you’re doing it now; you were doing it before your role at the school. How do you think you successfully build a deep relationship with a young mind, a young person—and maybe not even just young people, but how do you build rapport with others and support people in finding their identities and creating safe spaces?
Tahnia Getson
I think this is so funny because I talk about safe spaces all the time. We talk about safe spaces versus brave spaces a lot. I think those are probably the two terms that…
Sam Demma
What’s the difference?
Tahnia Getson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the question, right? And so I differentiate them, and this is actually something that came alongside a colleague of mine who worked in that grassroots movement with me, and that was something that we talked about a lot. The safe space that you create is the space that people can come to without fear of judgment. And so they can come, they can be themselves. They don’t have to worry about masking. They don’t have to worry about pretending to be anybody but who they are authentically in that moment.
Tahnia Getson
And when you build spaces where people can show up to be authentically themselves, you get to learn people on a completely different front. You get to learn what they’re passionate about, what brings light to their eyes, what they’re genuinely excited about. And you get to meet somebody in a way that you’ve never actually met them before.
Tahnia Getson
I think that’s the coolest thing about building a safe space—if you think that you know people and you’ve just talked to them and you’ve met them in the hallway, and you say, “Hey, how are you?” and they’re like, “Yeah, I’m good. How are you?”—you think you know that person? You don’t know that person.
Tahnia Getson
But when you get to meet somebody and you get to see all of their quirks and tendencies and the way their face lights up when they’re talking about the smallest niche thing that they’re into, you really get to know somebody. And you connect with them authentically. And then that authentic connection is something completely different than anything else.
Tahnia Getson
Then you start to learn about the things that really, really, really drive them. And then you can take them as far as they’re willing to go because they trust you. And then they’re eager to learn. And then you can get them into the space that I refer to as the brave space.
Tahnia Getson
And that’s the learning space. And that’s the really, really powerful space because that’s where you can make effective change. And so the brave space is the space that you go to. This is the space that’s really important when you’re doing advocacy work because advocacy work is scary, and it’s hard, and it’s difficult.
Tahnia Getson
And that’s the space that we’re all really in, and have been in for a while, whether or not we’ve known it. The socio-political world has shifted a lot, and we’ve all seen it, and we see that we’re kind of in this point of tension. And that’s because we’re starting to shift things forward. And that’s really scary for people because they don’t know what change looks like, and they don’t know if change means that they’re losing something. And people are scared of losing things, even though that doesn’t actually mean that they’re losing anything. It just means that we’re giving space for other people to be on the same level as everyone else.
Tahnia Getson
It’s that equity space. So that brave space becomes really important because that’s where you educate people, and that’s where you take them from where they are and you move them ten steps forward. If you don’t have a brave space, you haven’t created a space where people can ask the questions without fear of judgment.
Tahnia Getson
And so we call them—for lack of a better terminology—we call them the “silly questions.” And it’s the questions that people are scared to ask because they’re scared they’re going to be judged for asking them. But they don’t necessarily know where to find resources. Now, I say that I’m happy—and I’m going to use the queer community as an example of this. And I use queer as an umbrella term; most people will use 2SLGBTQIA+ world.
Tahnia Getson
And so I tell people that they’re free to come ask me questions, and I’ve offered that. But you can’t do that with all marginalized communities because a lot of people are still working from their own points of trauma, and you can’t ask people to educate while they’re also trying to heal their trauma. That’s not fair to do to them. But I’ve offered that to people.
Tahnia Getson
And so I tell them to come ask me their questions because I’m happy to educate. And so I’ve offered them a space to come ask the questions because if I don’t give them the space, then they’re not going to ask the question and educate themselves. And so the brave space is the space where they can ask the question that they’re scared to ask so that way they can receive the education to then move themselves forward.
Tahnia Getson
And that brave space is a collective space, so that way, that education component is never falling on one singular person’s shoulders. And so that’s the difference between the safe space and the brave space. They do build off of each other, but they’re not identical to each other.
Sam Demma
How do you cultivate a safe space?
Tahnia Getson
It’s a lot of small practices that happen over time. And so part of it is—I’m going to use my office as an example because we have a safe space office. And part of it is that idea that you can show up wherever you’re at on that day, and we have an understanding in the office.
Tahnia Getson
And so part of it is that we reflect on our practices in the office and we go, “Is this still working? Is it not?” And those practices come from everybody. And so, for example, my student leaders this year came up with the idea of—yeah, I’m going to call it exactly how we called it—a safe word. I was deciding whether or not I wanted to say it exactly like that. It’s a safe word, essentially.
Tahnia Getson
So if someone’s having a bad day, because we are all very close in the office, and they do kind of, like, almost like to pick on each other like siblings sometimes. So if someone’s having a bad day and it’s not a day where we can, like, tease each other or something like that, they each have a safe word that they can implement: “Today’s not that day.”
Tahnia Getson
And so they know to respect that space and to understand that we are emotionally heightened that day.
Tahnia Getson
But we all also build co-guidelines together. And so in terms of, like, how we show up to meetings, how we practice accountability, how we like to be held accountable—all of those things are created together.
Tahnia Getson
One of the standard practices that I have with my staff, my student council, and my executive leaders is I like to check in with them and ask them how they like to receive gratitude because much like love languages, the way that you receive gratitude is different than the way that I receive gratitude. And if I’m showing you gratitude in the way that you don’t receive it, you’re never going to feel thanks for the work that you do.
Tahnia Getson
We bring in customary practices, like ensuring that everybody has the opportunity to share personal pronouns and preferred names, and that that’s always respected, and that there are regular check-ins should that ever change for somebody.
Tahnia Getson
We have the space where people can ask a question if they don’t understand what those personal pronouns are. But whenever we introduce people in meeting spaces, for example, I tend to give a little prelude of, like, “Hey, we’re going to do check-ins, we’re going to give names, positions, and pronouns. Just as a reminder, if you’ve forgotten what pronouns are, that’s just how you prefer to be introduced, such as she/her, he/him, they/them.”
Tahnia Getson
Because sometimes someone doesn’t want to admit that they don’t remember what a pronoun is. And so I just get ahead of it by saying it because no one wants to be the person that’s like, “I don’t remember what a pronoun is.” Even though that is commonplace practice now, there are still people who just don’t remember because it hasn’t been practiced for them for whatever reason.
Tahnia Getson
And so it’s just little things that you put into place that compound over time, and you kind of just learn them with your group. So there isn’t really one set way to do it. You just learn them with your group and reflect on them and whether or not they’re working.
Sam Demma
I love where this conversation went. I think it’s so applicable, especially for a lot of educators who tune in that work in high school spaces. And there aren’t enough safe and brave spaces in their buildings or in their institutions. So thank you so much for sharing a little bit of the ideas you have around cultivating those safe spaces and some of the practices.
Sam Demma
If there is another educator listening to this who is inspired by you and wants to reach out and ask a question or connect, what would be the best way for them to get in touch?
Tahnia Getson
Work is actually probably easier, which is just my first name, last name at gmail.com. And so that one’s the best, or you can just find me on LinkedIn. I’m generally the only Tahnia on there.
Sam Demma
Tahnia, thank you so much for taking the time to put the “Do Not Disturb” poster on your door and keep your colleagues out of your room for 30 minutes.
Sam Demma
I appreciate it a lot, and I hope you continue to create safe and brave spaces for students on campus.
Tahnia Getson
Thank you so much for having me.
Join the Educator Network & Connect with Tahnia Getson
The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education. By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators. You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.
