
The full document, Bringing the Ideas of Marvyn Novick to Life: An Anthology with Commentaries can be found here.
On Family
Reflections of Gillian Novick
My family is deeply appreciative of this publication and the opportunity it provides to hear about the legacy and continued relevance of my father’s work. We are glad to have a chance to provide a few words about how his thinking and understandings played out in his professional ideas and his life with us.
Growing up, everyone in my family knew that inside the cover of a book ona particular bookshelf, there was always a $20 bill. My dad made sure of this, always. His thinking was that it would be there for when it was required, if any of us needed it, always. Before we all had the ability to summon a car and pay for a ride with a few taps on a glass screen, a person in a jam might need it to pay for a cab ride home. If it was used, it would be replaced. It was there, period.
If it was grabbed to buy gas for the car, it reappeared. If my teenage siblings spent it on things teenagers, then as now, spend money on, it was there again. If I ordered a late-night pizza on a Tuesday, I knew I’d be able to do it again on another night, because it would be there.
And so we did, over and over again. My father, though, only got frustrated if we failed to inform him that we had used it. The issue was never that money was wasted or misused – this was irrelevant. Rather, it was about maintaining the integrity of the insurance system that was in place. Without proper information sharing, that system could fail and so might not be available when someone really needed it.
If this was true for his children and his family, it was necessarily true for all families, and for other people’s children. In 1994, he wrote:
We are compelled to care about the well-being and prospects of other people’s children as a condition of preserving our nationhood. If the value placed on national life recedes…our relations with children and each other change profoundly. Children lose their collective status and are no longer the bond of national continuity. Instead, they become private presences whose entry into the world is occasioned by private fulfillment…. Children inherit the condition of their sustenance and in turn are expected as adults to guard and enhance the bestowal of legacies to succeeding generations.
He often spoke and wrote of caring for families as a “covenant”. When he did, he meant that to care for others was sacred, and as close to primordial as organized societies can be – the absolute fundament upon which the edifice can grow. He was equally compelled by the covenant around other people’s children as he was by the children, grandchildren and family that touched him personally. In this way, he insisted on something sacred in something that was ordinary.
I think that the story of the $20 bill goes a long way to understanding how deeply and precisely my dad felt about the interaction between policy and its intended users: he insisted that it should capture real life. In real life, of course we used it for things that weren’t emergencies sometimes, so his system accounted for this. It had to, because its purpose was to provide security in the face of need. The household provided unconditionally, because to do so was good for all of us.
My dad would have been the first to point out that his perspective on the interaction of policy and family life was deeply informed by my mother’s work. My mother, Ryva Rogatko Novick, was the founder and director of The Children’s Storefront, the first family resource program in Canada. My dad was very much a part of the community it created, which meant that as he was working on ideas about policies that would impact family life, he was also hearing real, local and lived experiences of the people who were affected by policies and services. This affected him deeply and in every part of his work.
In the same sense that he loved to travel throughout Canada to meet with local organizations and community groups to hear about their unique challenges and experiences in engaging with policy, he also gave his students in Ryerson University’s School of Social Work assignments that would require them to actually apply for some of the services their eventual clients would be accessing, just so they understood first-hand exactly what this was like for real people.
My father worked to change the way people think about government and policy, but also about the way government and policy imagine people, so that they too would provide unconditionally. Families, people on social assistance and others in economically insecure positions needed the same sense of security and dignity as his own family, so that we all can feel secure, do our best, contribute and flourish. This too, is good for all of us.
Gillian Novick is Marvyn’s daughter.
On Marvyn’s Jewish Roots
Reflections of David Lewis Stein
Marvyn loved to go to United Bakers. This restaurant, owned by the third generation of one family, has successfully migrated from the old downtown Jewish neighborhood to one of Toronto’s first suburban shopping plazas. United Bakers is more than a centre for traditional Jewish delicacies such as gefilte fish, chopped herring and crisp potato pancakes. In the perpetually, busy, noisy, confusing ambience of “United,” one could find factory owners and union leaders, merchants and wholesalers, gamblers, artists, university students and teachers, politicians, and tables with whole families from small children to grandparents.
United Bakers is like a whole Jewish neighborhood. Marv often talked about how his experience of growing up Jewish in this kind of lively neighborhood helped to shape his intellectual and professional life. It clearly informed his strong commitment to solidarity and universality in social policy, his ability to speak to ‘ordinary people’, and his focus on what we have in common rather than on what divides us.
This was not a religious experience although he did occasionally come with me to a small observant synagogue that could have fit comfortably into Warsaw a century earlier. But when it came to the religious content of Judaism, I think Marv was probably agnostic and, when pressed, may even have said he was a full-fledged atheist. Still, he was always respectful of those who kept to the ritual practices of the Jewish religion. He appreciated their learning and the role they played in holding the Jewish community together.
Marv often identified himself as a “Jew of the diaspora,” part of the worldwide dispersal that began when the Emperor Hadrian destroyed Jerusalem and Jews were driven out of Israel and into centuries of rootless exile. In modern times, faced with war and the horrors of the Holocaust, many young people of Marv’s generation turned to Israel as a spiritual home. Marv, however, was rooted in Canada. His life and his work were here.
For the Jews who came to Canada from the country villages and urban ghettoes of eastern Europe, life had centered on the home and the synagogue. In Canada, and particularly in Toronto and Montreal, to an often hostile environment, Jews responded by creating a complex network of secular self-help and political organizations.
The Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) was particularly important. The YMHA matched the athletic facilities of the YMCA and added a wide range of educational and social activities. Marvyn thrived working in this non-athletic sector of the Y. It was here that he met Ryva who was engaged in similar community-building work and they eventually married. Among his other activities, Marv joined the effort to keep Yiddish alive. This international lingua franca of the Jews has been almost obliterated by the Nazis but Montreal remained a centre for Yiddish culture. Marv performed in amateur Yiddish plays. He had a good command of Yiddish and a fine resonant voice that served him well in his later career as a teacher and political advocate.
As his horizons expanded and his thinking deepened, Marv traveled across Canada and connected with thinkers and activists in Europe and even Vietnam. He ceaselessly worked on ideas of social progress that are discussed in this volume. But then he would take time off to have lunch at United Bakers and touch base with the roots of where it all began.
David Lewis Stein was a long-time friend of Marvyn’s and, for many years, the municipal affairs reporter for The Toronto Star.
On Community
Reflections of Wanda MacNevin
I first met Marvyn Novick in 1976 when he visited the Jane-Finch community in his role as staff with the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto. At that time, folks who worked at City Hall, and at social agencies downtown, did not understand suburban communities or their needs – imagining that areas like Jane-Finch, Rexdale, and Malvern were populated by “middle-class” homeowners (pre-dominantly Italian working-class families). Marvyn tossed a coin with a colleague and whoever lost had to come to Jane-Finch.
While reluctant to come at first, after a tour of the community, where he could see the poor planning and the ghettoization of low-income residents in poorly designed social housing, he also began to see the rich diversity of people who called Jane-Finch home. He embraced our community and worked with community leaders and agencies; he became a champion of the (inner-city) suburbs.
Marvyn said, “In 1976, we were living in the urban reform period in Toronto, where the suburbs were dismissed as a place of dull middle-class life. Downtown Toronto was where all the exciting things were happening with young wise people who were into new ways of living. We were on the cutting edge of urban life. . . why wouldanybody want to go up to Jane Finch!”
I was initially intimidated by Marvyn. A young single mom, with three young children, living in social housing; I felt lucky that the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre (Jane/Finch Centre) had recently hired me. I was just finding my way back into the working world. Spending time with Marvyn was a bit overwhelming. While his energy and enthusiasm in a meeting was contagious and he truly listened to what we had to say, clearly he was educated and well-informed. It was hard not to be overwhelmed by his thinking and his drive.
Marvyn clearly saw the inequities in our community, and this fuelled his decision to pursue the major suburban study for Social Planning Council called, Metro’s Suburbs in Transition. In the study he said, “it became clear that the rest of the world should know that there was another reality up there, which few knew about.” That report opened doors for resources and supports to all the inner suburbs across the City.
I remember specifically talking to him about our desire to have a resource centre that would offer programs for mothers and their children. Marvyn, in his action-oriented mode, arranged for a small group to visit the Children’s Storefront where Ryva, his wife, was the Executive Director. That visit solidified our thinking for the development of a Child/Parent centre we then set up in Jane-Finch.
Marvyn told us about his experience parking his car behind the apartment building that housed the Jane/Finch Centre. The wind was strong, and he could barely walk around to the front door. Thinking about mothers and their children, he took it upon himself to find out about wind-testing in this area. “There was no requirement at urban planning that there be wind-tunnelling done to see what impact all these different high-rises would have on generating these air-flows that would make it difficult for people to walk. Planners could have insisted that proposed high rise developments be wind-tunnelled. They could have sited them in a way so that the air flows would allow people to walk.”
Next thing I knew, Marvyn had made arrangements for some wind-tunnel studies to be done along Finch. There I was with one of his students, holding an instrument while walking along Finch. He was indeed an action-oriented person!
While Marvyn eventually become Dean of Community Services at Ryerson University, he never forgot us in Jane-Finch. He would make a point of coming to special Annual General Meetings. He came to the Centre’s Twentieth Anniversary event. “I remember going to the 20th anniversary of the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre.” He told me. “It was at Northwood Community Centre with about 80 – 100 people in attendance. Four generations of residents were there, people from many different ethno-cultural groups —- from South Asia, East Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. I remember saying to myself that in downtown Toronto, people talked community, but in Jane-Finch people lived community.”
In our last conversation, shortly before he passed away, he told me that he was looking forward to attending the Centre’s 40th anniversary. While I was sorry he wasn’t there to celebrate with us and share our accomplishments, I will always remember his commitment and dedication to leveling the playing field between the downtown city and Toronto’s inner suburbs.
Wanda MacNevin was a friend of Marvyn’s and in 2017 was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws by York University for her over 40 years as a leader, activist and author in the Jane-Finch community.
On Marvyn as a Public Academic
Reflections of Terry Grier
When I undertook to chair the search committee for Dean of the Faculty of Community Services at Toronto Metropolitan University in 1982 and saw Marvyn Novick’s name in the list of candidates, I could hardly believe our good luck. I knew his reputation from his work at the Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto. In the end, he was appointed and served for six years.
As dean, Marvyn brought a comprehensive knowledge of the urban world for which TMU was preparing its students, not least those in his faculty. He was an exemplary academic leader and administrator, a professional colleague with very effective bureaucratic skills that he never allowed to get in the way of the intrinsic objectives he sought. He was a rigorous, disciplined thinker and advocate, always civil, constructive, positive, and creative, with a powerful analytic ability.
Marvyn brought overdue leadership and cohesion to a faculty which consisted of half a dozen disparate departments which, up to then, had virtually no experience of working together. Under Marvyn, they began to cooperate in collective endeavours, of which the most significant was achieving professional accreditation for each of the academic programs. As this work progressed, and was ultimately successful, there emerged a strong collective morale and a new sense of mission. Faculty ‘in name only’ became a ‘faculty in fact’, highly regarded and respected. Marvyn’s leadership transformed the culture of his faculty. He was, as a colleague recalled to me recently “the perfect fit.”
When his successful term as dean ended, Marvyn chose not seek reappointment but joined the full-time Social Work faculty. He was a fine teacher and mentor to his students. It would have been a privilege to have been one of them.
Marvyn’s term as dean ended about the same time I was appointed president and TMU’s move toward full university status began to get underway. He strongly supported this development and we talked on several occasions about the kind of university TMU should seek to become. He urged that its character be consciously that of a City University: one which not only saw its mission in terms of academic programs of the highest quality, but also projected a broader ethos that would pervade the institution.
Such a university would foster and reflect an egalitarian attitude that would be sensitive to Toronto’s cultural and racial diversity, its issues of social justice for under-represented groups, accessibility, cross-cultural relations, at all times responsive to the issues and concerns of life and work in a very large city. Among the examples he cited were Sir George Williams in Montreal, and City University of New York.
Marvyn’s insights were an element in the ultimately successful case we put before the Ontario government in 1991. Several decades later, a much larger Toronto Metropolitan University is indeed a mature city university at the very heart of Canada’s largest and most diverse metropolis. I like to think Marvyn would approve of how TMU has evolved since his time.
It was a privilege to have been a colleague of his, working together in an enterprise of great importance. Marvyn was one of the most admirable people I have known and I learned much from him. Deeply principled and full of passionate intensity, he made his indelible mark on TMU and left it a better place for his having been there.
Terry Grier was the President of Toronto Metropolitan University from 1988 to 1995.