September 2022 / Toronto
Community organizations working with 2SLGBTIQ+ communities have been advocating for many years to be recognized in federal government priorities, plans and funding. Finally, the government of Canada has introduced a national plan with funding. But it falls short in many areas including the exclusion of im/migrant and refugee Queer folk. I've invited my colleagues from OCASI-PSI to share their thoughts in my blog.
August 2022 / Toronto - It is a sunny but cool morning as I sit to write this monthly blog in my messy backyard. There is a sense of peace as the cats lay about, lazily watching the squirrels go about their food gathering, all three of us listening to the wind softly rustling the leaves of the box elder maple tree overhead and the birds twittering as they call to each other flitting from tree to bush to tree.
July 2022 / Toronto - We are halfway through the year and the discussion at every sector meeting eventually turns to the worsening human resources situation in the non-profit sector and particularly in the immigrant and refugee serving sector, including women’s services. Organizations- non-profit and/or charities are having a hell of a time recruiting and retaining qualified staff in all areas of our agencies from admin to program; tech to finance. And within HR itself.
June 2022 / Toronto
I slept through it. TV on full blast at 3:00 am when I was awoken to hear CBC reporting what was by then old news. The Ford government had not only won a majority as predicted by media and other pundits, but he had a super majority. Didn’t really take it all in at that bewitching hour of the early morning; the time when our ancestors and angels whisper truths to us. I turned off the TV and went back to sleep a dreamless sleep.
May 2022 / Toronto
“Happy Mother’s Day to the moms separated by violent borders and imperialism”* was a tweet that crossed my screen early on Mother’s Day as I prepared to visit my own mother, ever thankful that my own separation from the woman who birthed me was a short three years, though as a child it felt like a lifetime. The tweet was from a feminist, anti-racist Black mother of a Black son whose community has experienced war, displacement and migration.
April 2022 / Toronto - The reported atrocities across Ukraine have added to the urgency to respond felt by Ukrainian and other concerned communities here in Canada.
March 2022 / Toronto
“When someone shows you who they are believe them”. This quote, often attributed to celebrated and well-loved African-American poet and author, Maya Angelou, appeared time and again on my various social media platforms as primarily Black, Asian and Arab people found themselves gaslighted, contradicted and called out, for raising concerns about the treatment of Black and racialized people, primarily international students attempting to flee the devastating war in Ukraine.
February 2022 / Toronto
Afro-futurism/African-Canadian Liberation/Black histories/ month- all contested and complex concepts. Not surprising given our people’s four hundred plus year presence on these Indigenous lands colonized and settled by the colonizers. Our place in the meta-narratives of what we now call Canada, diminished when not completely erased. Still. 2022.
December 2021 / Toronto
We enter this last month of the calendar year with increasing alarm and some frustration as new variants of the COVID-19 are detected here at home and throughout the world. Frustration- or at least mine, comes from the knee jerk response of the Canadian and other high income countries quickly moving to shut their borders primarily to travellers from countries in the Global South, in this case countries in southern Africa including South Africa (not considered a global south country).
November 2021 / Toronto
I forgot. For a long moment I forgot that I/we are living in “The Wake”, to borrow from Christina Sharpe. Sometimes the four hundred years old waves and eddies are disguised by the islands of liberation we carve out for ourselves in these broad and deep oceans of racialization and racism. Anti-Black racism.
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