Five Questions with Jenny Dickieson: Get to Know the New Foundation Program Coordinator

Jenny Dickieson knows that feeling of being lost during the first year of university as an ECU alum, where you don’t know where to turn or what resources to support you. As the incoming Foundation Program Coordinator, Jenny vows to offer students a helping hand through that initial whiplash of new surroundings and a heavy workload.

Jenny's experience volunteering at galleries across Vancouver and working in the Dean’s Office has given her a front-row seat to the hard work behind organizing events and helping students shine.

In this edition of our Five Questions With series, we chatted with Jenny about her new role and connecting with students.

What do you like about your role in the ECU community?

It’s funny to catch me right at the start – I’ve only been in the position for two weeks - but this is my dream job! Watching Gaye Fowler run Foundation events over the years and offering a soft landing pad for students has always been something I aspire to. I graduated from Emily Carr in 2017, so I'm an alum. After graduation, I worked in restaurants and galleries and did a bunch of jobs, but I applied for a job in Continuing Studies at ECU that summer, and I was delighted to come ‘home’.

After some years, I moved on to the Dean's office as an Assistant, and my favourite part of that job was connecting with students. However, in the Dean’s office, students arrive at the most challenging or the most celebratory times of their education, it can be intense to see polarized versions of what's happening with students. And while I loved the face time with students -even when it was hard- I'm excited for the Foundation role, where it'll be a much more diverse spectrum of students navigating their day-to-day university lives.

You've stepped into a new role as Foundation Program Coordinator. What’s one of your favourite aspects of observing and shaping the program?

I’m looking forward to the events and connecting with students, especially getting to know their interests and what excites them. Art and design are so beautifully woven into our lives in many ways, and I’ve always found that artists tend to have the most interesting hobbies. They’re usually great readers too, with amazing reading lists. I love the idea of creating a little ecosystem of events and opportunities where people can share, learn from one another, and explore what’s resonating with younger generations. Even though I’m 35 I feel like a perpetual teenaged dog mom, so I find it inspiring and interesting to see what young people are up to.

What’s one unexpected thing about this new role you want to demystify for others?

Outside of my previous role in the Dean's office, I did volunteer work and was on the board of Access Gallery. People forget that community events don't have to be perfect. Nobody's expecting them to be perfectly polished. People love to help, set up chairs, jump in and immediately be part of the conversation.

Events don’t have to be shiny, perfect and branded. It can be very spontaneous and grow and change as it's happening. People who are organizers, especially in a city with a robust arts culture like Vancouver, feel pressure to deliver something super polished and specific.

But that can make things really intimidating. I hope to bring a little bit of that grassroots style to Foundation students and help them realize that throwing events themselves doesn't have to be challenging. You can just book a room and meet with a group of people interested in knitting or video games or whatever, and things can evolve from there. Everyone's going to bring something interesting to the table, and the most important thing is to have fun.

What are you looking forward to as ECU turns 100?

I had an internship helping digitize archival photos from artists at the Western Front from the 60s and 70s, which was a super vibrant time for the arts in Vancouver. It brought me closer to local history and made me feel like the '60s and '70s were not that long ago; so to me, we still feel like such a young school. I feel connected to the heritage of being on the fringe and making things work. Artists have always been like that, and so I hold on to the sentiment that we are pretty scrappy.

What I’m most excited about for the next hundred years is the location. I was on Granville Island the other day, where the old campus was, and walking around those old buildings was such a nostalgic experience. It was such an idyllic place for an art school, surrounded by a bizarre mix of established community, art, food, and tourists – something interesting was always happening.

Moving to the new campus was a big game-changer. Only recently has the new campus started to feel lived-in, like it's finally “broken in.” Seeing exhibitions in the early days of this campus was strange because we had to relearn what would work. At the old campus, it was obvious that ‘the big painting goes here on this wall, that's where it looks the best. The sculptures go here. This is where the best light is.’ So, we had to relearn all of that in this new place. The last year and a half, it feels like we are nailing that!

Finally, seeing the new train station coming together is exciting, it’s been loud but I hope that the train will bring more community to be surrounded by and bring some of the bizzarro energy of the island back. It’s frankly a relief to see proper graffiti on our campus walls now, making it feel more real. For the next hundred years, I am grateful and hopeful for where we are and where we’re headed.

What’s a book or piece of pop culture you’d bring to a desert island?

I have an immediate answer, which surprises me, but it's so true that I don’t want to change it! In the last seven years, I've become a gamer—I never used to be! I would take Stardew Valley with me. It’s the perfect escapist farm simulator game in which you’re a farmer living in a small town, growing vegetables, fighting monsters, and collecting local gossip. It’s the perfect cozy game, and the music is incredible. I could play it forever.