"This job isn't fatal. You almost can't mess up. We all go through times when we get tired and run out of ideas but new ideas will come along. You just have to watch for them. You have to let the fatigue pass and you have to give yourself time to learn those other things that are out there. The biggest gift coordinators can give themselves these days is time. Even when they're feeling really rushed off their feet, somehow they have to give themselves the time to get through it all, not be so demanding of themselves and not to try and learn everything all at once."

I was interested in Nancy's concept of time. "Coordinators need time to learn," she explained to me, "but people also need to understand that the field of literacy and how we work in it requires time to evolve and develop and mature as well. That's the best thing about literacy. It's so "frontier" - that's the absolute best thing. Literacy is still a frontier issue and that means that it really allows for so much exploration. That's where I get the sense of time and space that I have. There are always emerging issues in literacy that are beginning to establish themselves. I don't feel pressured to understand those issues right away. They will evolve. Because this is a frontier issue, there's all that time and space. That's really exciting because it means a future of some kind."

One of the frontiers Nancy has been pioneering is literacy in the workplace. "The Write Break Program moved into workplace literacy because during the early years of working in the community project, almost all of my learners worked at the plants, at either Syncrude or Suncor. If they didn't work for the plants directly they worked for a company contracted by the plants. The logical step was - 'Why don't we just move this project a little closer to where our learners are. Perhaps not physically, but let's partner up and work together'."

"Well that was a hasty assumption on my part. It made so much sense to me but it didn't make a whole lot of sense to the plants. They weren't entranced with the idea that I might suggest they should help me mount a literacy program through their company."

"So I sort of again stepped back and gave myself that sense of time and space and said well, 'It'll just happen with some more thinking and talking about it.' So I formed some contacts with people at the various plants and talked to trainers wherever and whenever I could. I always tried to sound enthusiastic. Instead of getting people excited because literacy is such a terrible problem I tried to get them excited by showing them that it was really no problem at all. The soft peddle approach really worked much better. People said, 'Well, if it's something that's manageable and if there's something I can do to help ... '"

"Literacy is often trotted out as a really scary, insurmountable kind of problem. If you scare someone they won't want to touch it. So you want to make it touchable, you want to make it manageable. I wouldn't have worked as a literacy coordinator for this long if I didn't think it was a manageable problem. That's where my faith lies. I have to believe it's manageable. I have to believe it can change."

"The plants really liked that nonthreatening, action-oriented approach. And then a stroke of luck. Lloyd Campbell from Syncrude discovered that one of the supervisors going through the supervisor development centre where they enhance manager's skills had a reading comprehension problem. Because I had talked to a lot of people he knew to come to me."