The ReD Mug Coffee Circle - The Little Program that Could
We all like happy stories. I mean, sometimes we indulge in cathartic heart-wrenchers—but don’t we all like it when the underdog protagonist wins over evil?
Today, I want to share a happy story, a story akin to one of my favourite children’s stories, “The Little Engine That Could.” Just in case you are not familiar with this inspirational piece of children’s lit, the story is about a small train engine (and this is from the days when we did not know Thomas and Percy et al) who has to take on the task of taking an essential but heavy cargo to the top of a hill, a task which the bigger and stronger engines had declined. It is a tough slog for the little engine, but the little engine repeats the mantra (not a word in use when this story was written!) “I think I can, I think I can” over and over until it crests the top of the hill.
I remembered loving this story as a child, and I was overjoyed when I heard my own young children tackling a new task while saying “I think I can, I think I can.” Sometimes when I have to lean into something hard, I still visualize the little red engine from the illustrated storybook and tell myself “I think I can, I think I can.”
And we know from modern research that believing you can do something generally results in more positive outcomes. Competitive athletes visualizing their perfect performance is one application of this theory.
In law, we tend to do the opposite because our dominant thinking style is negative. We are trained to hone our skill of identifying all of the possible negative outcomes—from issue spotting on law school exams to drafting contracts to cross-examination. We need to identify and face, head on, the negative possibilities. And, if we are not careful, we can become steeped in negative thinking which spills over into non-lawyering parts of our lives.
So, today, I want to share a happy story. Unlike The Little Engine That Could, this is a true story, and it involves people in our community which makes it the best kind of story! Not everything in a happy story has to be happy—we know that plots have twists and turns and that every story has a conflict. When I was in school, we classified conflict in story arcs as "person versus person", "person versus self" and "person versus nature". To be honest, we said “man” instead of “person” but please allow my memories a slight correction.
Once upon a time—before a virulent pandemic descended on all of us—Assist’s board and senior volunteers met to brainstorm strategies for supporting articling students and junior lawyers who were experiencing harassment or discrimination during either their articles of clerkship or the recruitment process. This is the conflict part of the story—and articling students were experiencing person versus person conflict (interactions with principals and senior lawyers, and perhaps even judges, who were treating them inappropriately), person versus self (where they begin to doubt their ability to make it through their articles) and person versus nature (or more accurately, the system) which traps articling students into a twelve month period of gruelling ordeals, a slight variation on The Hunger Games!
Back in 2019, the Law Society of Alberta released its Articling Student Survey, in which current articling students and lawyers in their first five years of practice were asked about their experiences. One of the key, and most concerning, findings was that 32% of survey respondents reported experiencing harassment or discrimination. Assist provides both counselling services and peer support to articling students, and while we saw many articling students in both programs, we were not seeing this magnitude of students.
Since Assist cannot control the interactions between senior lawyers and students, or how the students feel, or how the system works, we wanted to find ways to make support for articling students and junior lawyers easy and accessible, and two plans were crafted. The first involved teams of volunteers placing calls to all articling students to ask how they were doing, showing that there are lawyers in our community who care, and the second involved “pop-up peer support” where a volunteer would be available for chats in a public place like a courthouse coffee shop who could chat with students and juniors. Our volunteers would be identifiable by their red mugs, so we named this program the Red Mug Coffee Circle.
In the early days of the 2020 lockdowns, we moved RMCC online and invited everyone who wanted community to join us as well as articling students and junior lawyers to mingle with a group of peer support volunteers. We had about five people, the first week, but once word spread, we generally had fifteen to twenty people in attendance (including a handful of peer support volunteers who shared wisdom and inspiration). And we learned something new: there was a population of lawyers who didn’t neatly fit in the definition of articling students and junior lawyers who needed support: internationally trained lawyers who were working on their NCA qualification or who had obtained their Certificate of Equivalency from the NCA but not yet found articling positions. We then also met articling students whose articles were terminated mid-year for varying reasons, or no reason at all, as well as junior and not so junior lawyers seeking to find something different in their careers.
Many people wish that Red Mug Coffee Circle could deliver happy endings to students and lawyers seeking jobs in the form of jobs, but unfortunately that is something we cannot do. We are a registered charity and can only operate within charitable objectives approved by the CRA. Our objectives are rooted in education and support for legal community members regarding substance use, mental health issues and personal issues. While struggling to find a job falls within the concept of “personal issues,” running a job-finding program is not within our mandate.
So, we go as far as we can to assist jobseekers without jeopardizing our charitable status.
We are very proud of RMCC as a cost-effective and successful grassroots program, and this week Glen Hickerson, Ronke Omorodion and I delivered a presentation about how RMCC works at the Institute for Well-Being In Law (acronym IWIL, a cute variation on “I think I can!”) so that other organizations in the legal sector could follow our model. And rather than just patting ourselves on the back about what a great job we think we are doing, we decided to gather data about how participants view the program as it isn’t enough that we like it ourselves—so we sent a short survey to all RMCC participants whose email addresses we had, about 120 people, and 20 participants responded. To encourage responses, we held a draw for a Starbucks card, and we are pleased to announce that Shannon Fuhrer won!
And today, I want to share some findings with you so you can participate in our feelings of gratitude about what we have been able to do and join our vision for continued programming going forward.
First, almost 80% of participants rated their satisfaction with RMCC as 10 out of 10. A few participants rated their satisfaction at 8 or 9, and we had one rating of 3. We were puzzled by the rating of 3 since that participant provided 9s and 10s on related ratings like whether they would recommend RMCC to others and whether programming was helpful. It may be that this person came to RMCC with a particular expectation which was not met but felt positive about other aspects of the program. It is also possible that this outlier score was an error.
Almost 90% or survey respondents rated how welcome they felt at RMCC as 10 out of 10, with 8 out of 10 being the lowest score—so 100% rated how welcome they felt at or above 8 out of ten!
A further almost 90% (89.5%) rated the likelihood of recommending RMCC to others as a 10 out of 10, with 9 out of 10 being the lowest score. In other words, all respondents said that they were extremely likely to recommend RMCC to other people!
All participants who responded to the survey found discussions at RMCC extremely helpful, very helpful or moderately helpful. No one rated discussion as neutral or less than helpful.
We asked participants if they would prefer going back to pop-up peer support, as we had initially envisioned, and all participants indicated that either they weren’t likely to use that resource or that they would only access these sessions if they were in addition to our weekly online community.
Our quantitative feedback supports that RMCC is an effective program which is satisfying participants’ needs. We will be considering all of the feedback to determine if tweaks are warranted but the survey results were strongly positive so that we know that RMCC will be continuing!
But our favourite part of the survey was the qualitative part where participants shared thoughts about what they valued most about RMCC:

What a wonderful story! We set out to try to create community and address the needs of newcomers and juniors in the profession, and it looks like we managed to tote this heavy load up the hill! And participants at the IWIL Conference, primarily from North America, were very interested in exploring how they could create a cost-effective and supportive program on our model. In fact, one conference participant from the US has already reached out to ask if they can share our resources with an organization they belong to!
Often stories have denouements, another word from English class, where we learn about something subsequent to the story. We are working towards an important denouement for RMCC, but notwithstanding the denouement, there will be ongoing sequels to the RMCC story in the form of further weekly meetings. And there may also be spinoffs from the RMCC in the form of other Pop Up Peer Support ("PUPS") sessions.
So, here is the leadup to the denouement. We kicked off the original drop in coffee events in January of 2020, and we held our first online Red Mug Coffee Circle on April 20, 2020. This means that RMCC is in the process of turning 5—and we would like to invite everyone to a fifth birthday online gathering at noon on Monday, April 21st where we can share our favourite memories and visit with friends we haven’t seen for awhile. Please save the date and watch for details.
To everyone who helped make RMCC the wonderful community that it is, thank you! People often say “we couldn’t do it without you” with varying degrees of sincerity. But with RMCC, it is all due to the people, both participants and volunteers, who make it work. Please take a bow.
On Monday, January 27th, please join us as we discuss the RMCC survey feedback and ask participants for more thoughts about how we can reach lawyers and students in need.
I hope to see you soon.
Loraine