This post is part of my 3DR newsletter where I share what I’m (un)learning to build just futures. It centres around my 3DR approach to equity: Decolonize. Disrupt. Dismantle. Rebuild. If you approach the world with curiosity and you’re looking for courageous and compassionate conversations around social justice and collective liberation, subscribe to my newsletter.
This year, one of my intentions is to get involved locally to see the change that I want to see in my world.
A lot of my writing and work is often focused on the 3Ds of my approach to equity – decolonizing, disrupting, and dismantling systems of oppression – which is necessary and important work, of course. But I want to focus more too on the “R” – the rebuilding. I want to focus more this year (and for the years to come) on creating the world that I want for myself and for future generations.
As Kwame Ture writes, “When you see people call themselves revolutionary always talking about destroying, destroying, destroying but never talking about building or creating, they’re not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing about revolution. It’s creating.”
This year, I’m focusing on the generative work of paving better pathways and creating more equitable possibilities for our future. I’m focusing on expanding my imagination and exercising the creativity it takes to actually build caring communities. I’m focusing on transforming our world from the ground up, from the local and community level.
I started the year reading Maria Ressa’s How to Stand Up to A Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, a book that shows how the creep towards authoritarianism, in the Philippines and around the world, has been aided and abetted by some of our largest tech companies. It was a wake-up call revealing how the foundations of democracy can be destroyed quietly and little by little, by what she calls, “destruction by a thousand cuts”. While she shares her experiences battling the tyrannical former President Duterte in the Philippines, the lessons apply more widely around the globe. Ressa captures with such clarity and conviction our need to engage as citizens and mobilize on the local level.
I am seeing this playbook of “destruction by a thousand cuts” unfold right here in Canada, specifically in Ontario where I’m based. Our conservative provincial government, led by Doug Ford, has been slowly but surely working to dismantle our democratic foundations. Let me count the ways…
In response to education workers’ demands for a living wage, Ford’s government passed Bill 28, invoking the notwithstanding clause, which trampled the rights of workers to free and fair collective bargaining. He quickly repealed the bill after sustained public protests.
My partner and I protested at the Ontario Provincial Parliament against Bill 28 and in support of education workers.
His government has also walked back on the promise to protect the Greenbelt – the world's largest greenbelt, which is comprised of 2 million acres of protected land that provide us with fresh air, clean water, and local food and drink. In the midst of the climate crisis, Bill 23 strips the Greenbelt of environmental protections allowing Ford to take 74,000 acres of farmland and natural areas.
Known as the “strong mayor” legislation, Ford’s government passed Bill 39, allowing the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa to pass bylaws aligning with provincial priorities without majority support from City Council.
Most recently, Ford announced that the government will be directing public money toward private surgery clinics, meaning that a number of publicly-funded procedures will be moved out of public hospitals and into for-profit facilities. This move towards privatization will only worsen the already dire healthcare crisis.
All this in just the last few months!
…but wait – there’s more!
It’s happening on the municipal level too. In just the last month, we’ve seen how Mayor John Tory not only continues to fund the police despite the public’s vociferous calls to defund, but has instead increased their budgets while starving out essential social services. Emergency shelters and warming centres, mental health services, affordable housing options, and community spaces are overlooked as millions of dollars are poured into our community’s surveillance and criminalization.
Slowly but surely, our communities are changing to solely benefit for-profit corporations and problematic institutions. It happens so slowly, so quietly until one day we are just left with a world we no longer recognize, asking ourselves, “how did it all come to this?”
I don’t want it to get to that point. And so my commitment this year (and for the years to come) is to get more involved at the local level. To create change in the proximate environment around me. To take care of the neighbourhood, community, and city in which I live.
Some organizations I am learning from and strive to support over the next year include:
Progress Toronto – a not-for-profit organization that advocates and organizes for a more democratic, socially just, and progressive city.
Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction – a grassroots initiative that endeavors to reduce the harm and burden that society places on Indigenous people with stigmatized experiences such as substance use, houselessness, incarceration, and most recently, COVID-19 and more.
Planned Parenthood Toronto – a community health centre providing trusted and non-judgmental sexual, reproductive, and primary healthcare and programs to youth all across the city. I’ve actually been working with them over the last year as a communications strategist and have learned immensely from their leaders about reproductive justice and investing in our youth at the local level.
No Pride in Policing Coalition – an antiracist queer and trans group formed to support Black Lives Matter-Toronto and is focused on defunding and abolishing the police.
The 519 – a charity committed to the health, happiness, and full participation of the 2SLGBTQ+ communities.
Another Toronto is Possible – a coalition of Toronto-based grassroots organizations including No Pride in Policing, Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction, Bloordale Community Response, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Toronto, Trans Bisexual Lesbian Gay Asexual at York, Policing-Free Schools, No One Is Illegal Toronto, Doctors for Defunding Police, Jane-Finch Action Against Poverty.
As the community organizer and activist Dave Meslin, writes:
“…the word ‘citizen’, while it automatically entitles us to certain basic rights and privileges, also demands something in exchange. What your city can do for you is important; the flip side, what you can do for your city, is the other half of the deal. It needn’t be as extravagant as building a hospital: you can organize a neighbourhood picnic, fight the demolition of a beautiful building, run for City Council, even just pick up some litter. We can’t wait for the politicians to do these things for us. The way we make our city better is to do it ourselves.”
I don’t know if it’s a function of getting older and simply paying closer attention to the world, or if the pandemic has just put everything in greater focus for me (or honestly, maybe it’s just always been like this)…but the world feels like it’s falling apart faster and in bigger, more catastrophic ways than ever before. From the near-daily climate disasters that are ravaging lives and livelihoods everywhere to the moves toward fascism around the globe. From the racial discrimination and economic disparities that keep widening and deepening to the freakin’ pandemic that has so drastically changed our lives. It all just feels…so bad. So bad that it can often feel crippling.
In the midst of so much doom and gloom, I hold fast to the words of community organizer and activist Mariame Kaba that “hope is a discipline”:
“It’s less about “how you feel,” and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning. And you’re still going to struggle. It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. You have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible, to change the world.”
Cheers to 2023, my dear friends. May we find the imagination and creativity within us to build a better world.