Natalie Noble has spent more than 15 years building programs and strategies for some of Calgary’s most vulnerable communities, from people experiencing homelessness to youth at risk of entering the justice system.
She graduated from the University of Calgary with a bachelor’s degree in political science, and since then her career has taken her from the front lines as a social worker to leadership roles at the Calgary Drop-In Centre, the Calgary Homeless Foundation and Wellspring Alberta.
In January, she stepped into her role as executive director of the Calgary John Howard Society (JHS), a non-profit that tackles the root causes of crime through housing, education, employment and restorative justice. Leading programs like community-based housing facilities and employment training, the JHS focuses on the context of why crime happens while resolving conflict, repairing harm, holding those responsible accountable, restoring relationships and preventing future harm.
In this conversation, Noble reflects on the lessons that shaped her, why she believes in restorative approaches over punishment, and how she finds hope in work that demands both resilience and compassion.
Editor’s note: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Emma Marshall: So you have an impressive background with community work, ranging from women’s outreach, the Drop-In Centre and the Calgary Homeless Foundation. Do you remember the first time that you felt pulled towards this field of work?
Natalie Noble: I don’t think there was a first time. I think that it’s a value system that was ingrained into me from a very young age. Both of my parents have served their community in different ways. My dad worked adjacent to the child welfare system. My mom served people with disabilities, so the dinner table conversations at my house were around how to help people, and what our social obligation is to make this community a better place for everyone.
That’s beautiful. I understand that you’ve worked both on the front lines and at the systems level. Do you remember a moment from your early social work days that still stays with you today?
There’s so many. How much do I want to traumatize you Emma?
(laughing)
Because those moments that gut you are the ones that really stick with you. Those typically, for me, have involved children, and that fuels my fire. I’m a passionate person. But if you’re too passionate, you’ll burn out. And I have burnt out a couple of times. So I would say, one that sticks out to me—that I think is relevant particularly in the work that I do at John Howard—is when I was working in the child welfare system with First Nations communities early in my career. When you’re serving First Nation communities, that’s where you really see the most layers of trauma and the most broken systems. So I had a case where I would take some children to go visit their mom who was in jail, and going into that system with kids and taking them in, it stuck with me forever.
Wow. That sounds really hard.
Yeah, it was, yeah.
After years of working in housing and homelessness, what made you want to step into criminal justice work at the John Howard Society?
Criminal justice intersects with everything. What’s interesting is the story that I was just talking about with those kids, I actually had a reaction. It surprised me. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s still there.’ It actually brought something up within me. Just thinking back to those moments, a lot of feelings emerge for me. It just shows that the service that I’m doing right now with the criminal justice system is so important.
It’s the end of the road for a lot of people.
It’s when everything hasn’t worked out for them. It’s when the accumulation of all of the complex challenges that person faces comes to a head, and all of a sudden they’re at rock bottom. We’re trying to help people out of rock bottom situations. As a social worker, that’s where we’re at. And a lot of people, when they hit their rock bottom, they are looking for help to get out. And so coming to John Howard, it’s that opportunity to help people when they’re at their most vulnerable. People need help out. They can’t do it on their own.
That was really well said, and the work is very important. Across your career, what has been the hardest lesson that you’ve had to learn as a leader?
I learn lessons every single day. They never stop. I think the hardest lesson that you have to learn when you’re a passionate social worker, when you’re a passionate servant of the community, is you cannot let that passion burn you out. There were times where I felt like I was screaming underwater. Especially when I was at the Drop-In Center, I was thinking, ‘Is no one paying attention? Does no one out there care that there are people that are suffering like this in our community?’ People look to other countries, and they look to the famine or war that might be happening in other countries. Look in your own backyard. It’s happening here. And so when you’re serving that population, in our city, in Alberta, with so much privilege around us, it can feel very isolating. It can feel that no one is listening, that no one cares. That can really defeat social workers and dim their light, burn them out and make them want to leave the field.
You can have the fire, you can have the passion, but you have to understand that change happens within the broader context of the systems that you’re in, and that it’s a push and a pull. You have to work with the community, you have to resonate with the community, you have to speak the language of the community in order to make a difference.
I feel that’s true in all walks of life, but especially true for a career in social work. So January 13th was your first day as the executive director at the John Howard Society. What did that day look like for you?
It looked like getting to know the staff. So having been a frontline worker, working with the people that we’re serving, I know what it’s like to do that work. So once you’re advancing in your career, and you’re moving from a place of doing frontline service delivery on the ground, you start to move into a different place where your service is for the staff that are doing that work. I mean, you also have the community that your work interacts with, or the government officials and funders that you’re accountable to. So I still have linkages to the front line, but my strongest linkage to the front line is to the staff, and that’s where I feel like I have to serve the most at this time.
The first day for me is getting to know people’s names. What’s their story? The first question that you asked me was, ‘What pulled you into the work? What are some stories that stick with you?’ Those are great questions for me to go and ask the staff, so that we can connect on a heart level, and they can see that I know what it’s like to be in their shoes.
A key value of the John Howard society is looking at youth crime through a lens of root cause and not just punishment. How do you explain that to someone who feels safer with a ‘tough-on-crime’ approach?
For someone that has a tough on crime approach, it’s because it’s so rooted in their own personal values. One thing I don’t ever try to change is someone’s personal values. To a certain extent, I’m probably going to agree with them. Yeah, youth need accountability, and so we are here at John Howard to help create opportunities for youth to take accountability. We’re here to help. If I’m talking to this person, what I want to say to them is, ‘I don’t want you to have to worry about your car being broken into. I don’t want you to have to worry about vandalism of your home. So Calgary John Howard has a long history of creating programs and services to help the youth, and invest in those youth, to make sure that you don’t have to be in a situation where you’re a victim of crime. We do that by making sure that youth are in a safe place, that they have housing, that they’re not out all hours of the night without anywhere to sleep, and for them to get into trouble, for them to commit crimes out of survival. We exist to make sure that you don’t have to worry about crime.’
You mentioned housing vulnerable youth. So the Roofs for Youth Program helps young people transition out of houselessness. What’s a success story that captures what that work is all about, if you’re able to share that?
Oh, this is the best part of my job. You really have to focus on the success stories, right?
In order for me to do this, I won’t share one client’s story, rather a story to explain some of the successes we get to see. I’ll just use a random name for a person to help me do this, let’s use Liam.
So Liam comes to us. His parents are unavailable. His dad has never been in his life. He has a single mom, and she suffers from addiction and mental health disorders that are so complex that she herself cycles in and out of houselessness. He is in a very unstable housing situation, and when his mom falls into homelessness, he also falls into homelessness. As a result of that, Liam has ended up at Calgary Young Offenders Centre (CYOC), and he’s gotten into trouble. We are able to give him a house. We meet him at the Calgary Youth Correctional Centre, and we can bring him straight into one of our housing programs. Through all of that, Liam doesn’t talk to anyone. He’s not engaging with the staff. He’s got depression. His room is not clean. He can’t get out of bed. He doesn’t make eye contact. His personal hygiene is really poor, and the staff accept him for him, just as he is.
They just try to build a relationship with Liam. They start with the small things, like making sure that he knows that there’s some food downstairs for him, and inviting him to come down and have a meal at the kitchen with them. Liam doesn’t even know how to have a meal at a kitchen table, because that’s not something his family has ever done. Those simple acts of kindness at the start pays dividends in the long run. All of a sudden, the staff are encouraging Liam to take a shower. Liam gets to meet our amazing mental health clinician who helps him address some of the mental health issues that he has. Perhaps it’s getting on medication which he’s needed for untreated ADHD, untreated depression. All of a sudden, the sun starts to shine for Liam a little bit more. Addressing Liam’s personal hygiene is really important, because he has no self esteem. Getting him on some medication where he can feel like he can get up in the morning and take a shower and start to have some self worth, creates opportunities for Liam to start thinking about school.
For Liam, it’s embarrassing. A lot of our Liam’s are somewhat illiterate, so we’re starting at the rock bottom. We’re starting at ground zero for some of these youth. And then Liam gets into some education programs. We get him going. His self esteem is increasing. We give him a few little work opportunities so he can continue to build self esteem. This isn’t an overnight process, by the way. Liam’s been with us at this point for three, four years.
Liam definitely started in our group care facility, and then we transitioned Liam into an independent apartment once he got a job. This is a success story that we don’t always see. These stories do happen, but I don’t want to paint a picture that they’re all like Liam.
But Liam is the one that makes us keep coming back to each stage and making sure that we don’t give up when their room is a mess. We don’t give up when they haven’t showered in a week, because we know that was Liam, and that Liam is now out there and doing really well.
It’s amazing to hear that those stories exist because of your work. Even though this isn’t everybody’s reality, just to know that’s even a few people’s realities through these interactions is inspirational. Do you find that hope comes easily in this work? Or do you really have to work to hold on to it?
One of the ways that I describe myself is that I’m a hope carrier. Being a leader, I carry hope not only for the people that we serve, because they’ve lost all hope, but I also carry hope for the staff that have started to lose hope. For me, it’s a very personal question because it’s who I am. It comes easily because it’s baked into my DNA, and it’s my value proposition to the world.
If you could wave a wand and change one policy tomorrow to make communities safer and overall more supportive, what would it be?
It’s homelessness. Start at the beginning. What is the most significant driver of crime? I believe that is homelessness. I think that when you don’t have somewhere safe to go, when you don’t have a roof over your head, it starts survival in the most raw and the most disruptive form. So if there was one policy, if I had a magic wand, is that there would be absolutely no homelessness. I know a lot of people in the community will go back to addiction, saying ‘Well, people are addicted, and that’s why people commit crime.’ Well, can you imagine being sober and homeless? If I was homeless, I wouldn’t want to be sober. I would want to cope in any way that I could to get rid of the pain of being homeless.
Especially here, where the weather is also against you. It’s not even just spiritually and emotionally painful, but being unhoused in Calgary is physically unbearable.
Exactly.
What do you think society most misunderstands about people who get involved with the justice system?
That they’re doing it from a nefarious place. That people who commit crimes are doing it from a place of evil. A good chunk of crimes are committed for survival.
Totally. We will all do what it takes to survive. Outside of the office, how do you keep your joy alive?
When you’re in a serious world and doing serious work, when you’re faced with trauma and a lot of frustration, joy can come from a place of playfulness. It’s about not taking myself too seriously. I like to play pranks on people. I like to go on ski trips with friends and wear a silly 80s outfit. I like to dance. I like to laugh, to just have fun, be playful, be a kid.