THE GOOD FIGHT
As a child, she watched bullying. Now she’s helping kids step in.
CALGARY—Just before the start of a new school year, Lisa Dixon-Wells is standing in front of a group of teachers, as she does countless times, with a message.
As she opens her session in the small, cluttered classroom, she jokes that if she had her way, she would have two full days to discuss the issue of bullying. But given the busy pre-September prep time, a three-hour talk will have to do.
Despite the lighthearted tone, she’s not exaggerating: Dixon-Wells is a fountain of facts, figures and statistics about bullying and its impact, and she has big ideas about how to create change — far more than she can fit into just a few hours.
It’s not about changing the bullies, she explains, but creating communities where bullying behaviour is unacceptable.
Her organization, Dare to Care, has brought bullying prevention and education programs to more than 1,200 schools since the group was founded nearly 20 years ago. She and her team work with kids, parents and teachers in an effort to make sure everyone in a school community has the tools to identify and address bullying.
When Dare to Care was founded in 1999, the organization was a one-woman show. Dixon-Wells handled every aspect of the work under a single corporate sponsor until making the official transition to a non-profit organization in 2013. Now, the group has a volunteer board of directors and four trained contract facilitators who run sessions at schools. Dixon-Wells is focused on bringing more people onto the team so she can reach even more kids.
Dixon-Wells’ work focuses on children, but her message is about the insidious ways bullying can affect everyone. During her session at the school, she asks the teachers to think about the names and faces of people who were considered their school bullies growing up. “I’m sure even now you can remember,” she says, as many nod along.
Those little bullies often turn into big bullies and bring the same behaviour into their adult workplaces and relationships, Dixon-Wells says. And that’s a cycle that she aims to stop in its tracks.
Dare to Care’s message emphasizes creating safe communities by educating the people who witness bullying but don’t do anything to stop it — and DixonWells says she counts herself among those who have been bystanders. Sometimes people assume her passion for the cause comes from experiences of being bullied herself, but it’s the thought of a boy she knew through all her school years that reminds her of how damaging bullying can be.
“In Grade 8, this boy was in my homeroom and I watched daily as he was threatened, pushed down the hall, shoved into lockers, glasses stepped on — just absolutely ruthlessly treated,” she says.
Years later, he showed up to her high school reunion and Dixon-Wells decided she had to say something.
“I remember going up to him and saying, ‘I’m so sorry for how we treated you.’ And he burst into tears and said, ‘Thank you. You’re the first person who’s ever acknowledged how tough things were for me.’
“His life, I happen to know, has never recovered from that.”
Taking on bullying prevention involved a few unexpected turns from her original career plans. Growing up in Calgary, Dixon-Wells, 56, knew from the time she was 12 that she wanted to be a physical education teacher. As a competitive swimmer, sport had been at the centre of her life and family from an early age.
After studying kinesiology and education at the University of Calgary, she took her first phys-ed teaching job in Portage la Prairie, Man. But just a year after she arrived, Dixon-Wells was asked to fill an unexpected vacancy for a school counsellor.
“It was the worst mistake I made in my life,” she tells the gathering of teachers, nearly 30 years later, adding, “And also the best mistake.”
That mistake was the first step on the way to founding Dare to Care.
“I worked harder my first two years as a school counsellor than I did in all of my university, because now it was real,” Dixon-Wells says. “These issues were real, these kids were real, and I didn’t want to let them down.”
Bullying was an issue that stood out right away. At first, Dixon-Wells focused on the kids identified as bullies and their targets, bringing them into separate groups and working on skills to try to stop the cycle. But she saw, time and time again, that any progress was reversed as soon as the children went back to their classrooms.
“In the safety of that little group, (the targets) seemed to be thriving, but you send them back to the classroom where nobody else stood up for them and they quickly reverted to being a target again.”
Today, the vast majority of schools that have gone through the Dare to Care program are in Alberta. But Dixon-Wells has also taken the sessions for students, teachers and parents across western Canada, as well as to a handful of schools elsewhere in the country and internationally.
Last year, they began giving workshops to amateur sports teams as well, with Dixon-Wells pushing to keep expanding the organization’s work.
Randy Chevrier, a former CFL player who is now one of the Dare to Care workshop facilitators, says that relentless drive is one of Dixon-Wells’ defining characteristics.
“She’s tireless,” he says. “Basically, she wears every hat for Dare to Care and she’s been doing it for years.
“From Lisa I’ve learned that if you’re passionate about something, the opportunities will come.”
Dare to Care’s philosophy turns the old focus on bullies and their targets on its head. Instead, parents, teachers and students are taught that the “silent majority” of bystanders who witness the behaviour have to create a culture where bullying is unacceptable.
“We may not change the 2 per cent of kids in the school who really are the ringleaders, the bullies of the school,” Dixon-Wells says, “but we can darn well empower the 98 per cent to take a stand to the 2 per cent.”
Nimue Lacelle, a Grade 9 student at Calgary’s H.D. Cartwright School, went through the Dare to Care program earlier this year. She said the all-day session went beyond many of the messages she’s heard about bullying throughout her school life: the basics about what not to do and to always tell an adult if someone is being bullied. “I feel like Dare to Care dove deeper into what all of that actually means,” she said.
“The presentation definitely opened up some options for if I see bullying going on,” she said. “It helped me understand what, exactly, I can do to help.”
Dixon-Wells’ work in bullying prevention happened somewhat by accident, but she says it’s not entirely surprising. She was a “rescuer” as a child, something she continues in her adult life rescuing animals. At one point, she had four rescue animals living with her — three cats and a dog — but she’s now taking care of just two senior cats.
“I seem to attract people who need to talk,” she says. “I seem to be the one people come to.”
And she’s motivated to help people feel capable of intervening in a way she never did for the boy she still remembers.
Dare to Care’s facilitators are in front of about 45,000 students every year, and Dixon-Wells says those presentations can be especially intense. For middleschool students, it’s a full day of learning that can quickly become emotional.
“We often find that toward the end of the day, those kids who have been identified as the bullies are actually going up and having heartfelt apologies,” she says.
“Tears — lots of tears and a lot of relief that these kids are finally owning what they’ve done and realizing the damage they’ve done and making those apologies.”
Chevrier says the impact of Dare to Care’s message is clear from watching those sessions.
“You don’t know what’s going on in people’s lives, but that eight hours a day … that might be the time they get to escape what’s going on.”
The Star is profiling 12 Canadians who are making our lives better. Next week we talk to Indigenous culture booster Sage Paul.