Farid is a Community Development Worker for the Jane/Finch Centre and has been working with partners, community residents and activists for over 22 years to build capacity of residents and to improve conditions in the Jane Finch community. As of August 2018, Farid continues to be a passionate worker with a firm belief that working people and low-income people have the ability to control their own lives.
Please start by telling me a bit about yourself and how you came to the Jane-Finch community.
I started working for the Jane/Finch Centre more than 22 years ago as a Community Development worker. I came to Canada as a political refugee from Iran. I have a diploma in community work from George Brown College, and BA in Sociology as well as BSW and MSW from York University. I am heavily involved with international solidarity work within the context of global workers’ movement. I am also a father and partner. I’ve been engaged with mostly community development, grassroots organizing, and social justice work in the community throughout this time.
When you first started this job, how did you introduce yourself to the community and tell me about your approach to community development?
I went around to the different neighbourhoods, talked to many residents, approached them, introduce myself and gave many people my card. Some knew about the Jane/Finch Centre and others didn’t know. I also spoke to a number of organizations already established in the community – other community workers and organizations. I went to their meetings and I also went to the different programs that were happening across the community. I was also part of organizing public education workshops, and leadership development training at the Centre. I did a lot of door to door outreach. I could say that I went door-to-door in all the buildings in the community, including public housing buildings and private buildings. I’m talking about thousands and thousands of people in buildings at the time I started doing my work in the community. That helped a lot in terms of getting to know different areas and also talking to people – one-on-one information sessions and things like that. Since then, things have continued on a different level with different types of work.
This has been evolving slowly because we’ve gone through so many different phases in the last twenty-five years. I started at the height of the Mike Harris government where there were lots of attacks on poor and working people, racialized people, people on social assistance and disability. Rent control was abolished around the same time. We witnessed that lots of people were being evicted; people were cut from social assistance. Despite the fact that I had to do community development, but I ended up doing a lot of one-to-one support to the community residents as well. It was really overwhelming – very limited resources and at the same time, we kept talking about the fact that we needed to address these issues on the broader level and systemic level because our capacity to provide one-on-one support was very limited and the issues were overwhelming, so we needed to push for systemic changes. Our community development approach was while we were working with community residents from where they were at in terms of their knowledge base and their real conditions at the time, support them and work with them on those issues but also at the same time push for more community cohesion, for social justice work, anti-poverty work and also supporting grassroots organizing – particularly resident-led grassroots organizing. So, we wanted to make sure that a lot of the work that we do with the number of community groups in the community, resident activists would emerge as leading figures and spokespersons for the community as opposed to only from the Jane/Finch Centre. So, the approach was very much around collaboration and being a resource for the community but also pushing for a social justice agenda as well.
At that time, and from your perspective, what issues were residents facing in the community and how did you work with them to respond?
It was a very overwhelming time as you can remember like for instance, the minimum wage was frozen at $6.85 an hour from 1995 to 2003, rents were sky-rocketing, Toronto Community Housing maintenance issues were really getting worse as there wasn’t any new money coming to social housing and we noticed a hike in homelessness. Many people in our community were living in overcrowded conditions sharing one or two bedrooms, there were major cuts to social assistance which ended up affecting so many people in not being able to afford the basic necessities such as food and clothing. These issues we were dealing with on a regular basis and at the same time, we noticed there was lots of attacks on things like workers’ rights and the changes to labour legislation.
We tried by responding to the immediate issues of the community members and in partnership with other community organizations as well but at the same time tried to form alliances across the City. For instance, we became part of a coalition called North York Fights Back which was organizing the North York part of the city by bringing different community based organizations, labour movement activists, anti-poverty activists and organizations in North York together to push back against the agenda that was very, very right-wing in terms of the ideological aspect but also directly affecting working people and the poor in the City. Jane-Finch was really badly affected in that sense. So, I would say a combination of issues related to the immediate needs of community members around employment, workers rights, social assistance and housing.
There were changes obviously at the provincial level in terms of the aggressive neo-liberal austerity agenda that we saw in the Mike Harris era. It softened a little bit after the Liberals got elected but they continued in a different sense. For instance, by the time the Liberals came to power under the McGinty government, still people were on social assistance were already fifty percent behind on the poverty line. So anti-poverty groups were pushing that people needed increases so that people can live at least at the poverty line. There was such a high percentage of people who lived below the poverty line – people on Ontario Works, on the Ontario Disability program but also people on minimum wage. So that didn’t happen. We just saw one to three percent increases which was only a few dollars a month while at the same time, we noticed after 2000, the cost of living in the city of Toronto increased, significantly.
The government didn’t plan anything, especially when it came to the housing and the cost of healthy food increased in a way that it was unprecedented. That made it very hard to be able to find decent affordable housing but also access to healthy food. The issue of healthy food became very paramount – access to healthy food in the community. At the same time there were other issues that we continued to work on, for instance access to healthy food through pushing Ontario Disability, Ontario Works for access to the special diet program. We worked with the partners to push for that so many more people could have access to the special diet program, benefiting from that. We worked with partner organizations in jane Finch and across the City such as the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and also lots of health providers against poverty to support hundreds of residents accessing the special diet program. After provincial campaigns that led to thousands of people being able to access the special diet program at the time, the provincial government started changing those programs making it much more difficult for people to access them.
Around 2006 or 2007, we held a number of community events – movie nights, discussions and workshops with community residents and we also noticed the growing anger and disappointment and frustration. Many community residents wanted to see positive systemic changes and they were frustrated around the fact that their voices were not heard. For that reason, we worked with resident activists and partner organizations to organize a community conference called Jane Finch is Getting On. A number of community-based organizations in the area and over three hundred community residents attended and participated in the discussions and out of that a community-based group was formed called Jane Finch on the Move. Following that also many community residents felt that we needed to do more work around various aspects of poverty in the community and the fact that some of the root causes of the problems that we had been facing in the community had to do with lack of access to employment, affordable food, poverty, and lack of investment in the community; so some anti-poverty initiatives started to be formed around 2007-2008 which out of that Jane Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP) was formed.
In addition to issues directly related to poverty, there were so many other issues for instance issues related to policing with a number of incidents that happened like targeted policing. After 2005, we also had to deal with issues like poverty by postal code and the shift by the City and the province towards more law and order approaches such as TAVIS and all that so we were also seeing all of these things happening; and at the same time we noticed the growing activism within the community as well by the younger generation and even the older generation and it was these different generations that wanted to come together and form grassroots initiatives which was a very positive development at the time towards.
Let me step back and ask you about food. The Heart and Stroke Foundation did some research to show the cost of groceries in different parts of the City. Can you tell that story?
That was towards 2008, 2009. There was this discussion about healthy food in the community - no research was done at the time, at least not by community residents. There was always this frustration of accessibility of healthy food, especially fresh produce and good quality products. Like you know good quality meat, fruit, vegetables in the area. There were a limited number of stores that would provide these kinds of supplies (in the community like Price Choppers and No Frills. When you went inside you would notice the differences with what they were offering; the same companies were offering different qualities in different parts of the city.
Along the same time that was being done, Heart and Stroke Foundation had done a research comparing healthy foods in different parts of the GTA. And, interestingly, they noticed that the cost of healthy food, not the junk food and all that but the cost of healthy food in Jane and Finch community was higher than not only in areas such as Scarborough, but rich areas such as Thornhill. Thornhill, which is one of the highest income areas in the GTA. Jane-Finch, which is one of the lowest income neighbourhoods in the whole GTA. Despite that, Jane-finch had a much higher percentage of cost of healthy food than areas such as Thornhill. That coincided with what was happening with people in Jane-Finch.
Some people from Heart and Stroke reached out to groups in Jane-Finch like Jane/Finch Centre, JFAAP, Black Creek Community Health Centre (BCCHC), at the time, so we initiated a project that was called “Right Food/Food Right” campaign to work on that. As part of our work, community residents compared the healthy food in Jane-Finch, and they went into different neighbourhoods across GTA to compare. Its kind of very much verified what the research was saying, especially when it comes to the quality of healthy food. After that, a lot of initiatives took place.
Hundreds of community residents came together and talked about how they could address the issues related to healthy foods. Things such as transportation, access to shops and stores on the streets where they’re accessible. Walking distance around the issue of walkability. Also issues regarding the inefficiency of the public transit system. Many community residents in this part of the city are very much isolated so they wouldn’t have access to other areas in terms of being able to easily drive places to get healthier food, cheaper food, and all that. Also, the fact that the incomes in the community, averages as one of the lowest, with highest percent of households with income under $30,000 per year. This is very low and that means people wouldn’t be able to purchase healthy food. The options for food are very limited and the kind of implication that could have. So, a bunch of work was done as a result of that. Some initiatives were formed and that continued for a couple of years and when the Black Creek Community Farm was formed, residents got together again and supported the Black Creek Farm but also the Jane/Finch Centre, BCCHC and other partners formed the Black Creek Food Justice Network that still continues today to work on accessibility of food and food justice.
You were involved in supporting and working with Jane Finch on the Move and Jane Finch Action Against Poverty as part of your role at the Jane/Finch Centre. Can you please tell me about those groups?
Around 2005 - 2006, The Jane/Finch Centre took initiative in terms of organizing a number of different initiatives such as movie nights and discussions, public education workshops and we also did partnerships with other organizations such as BCCHC, Friends in Trouble, CLASP (the legal clinic at York) and other partners at the time along with a number of community residents to come together to see what we could do to address ongoing concerns that were raised in community events. One concern was how community organizations could communicate better with community residents and activists, how community organizations could be more accountable to the community in terms of supporting residents to address these systemic issues then at the same time, community residents were expressing chronic frustrations with politicians in the community – the elected politicians. Sometimes we don’t know them or see them, the effectiveness of being a politician in terms of being strong voices for community residents, their lack of communication and also the fact that people didn’t feel that they had strong advocates at different levels of government when it comes to Jane/Finch. So, people felt that Jane Finch was very much isolated when it comes to infrastructural support and also the kind of investment or opportunity that other parts of the city have.
They got together around 2006 to see what we could do and during this time, we were organizing a number of events for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination – lots of big community events and also discussions. All of these were happening around the same time. People felt that we needed to be dealing with the racialization of poverty in Jane-Finch which needed to be addressed. So, many partner organizations got together and a number of community activists to organize the Jane Finch Getting On Conference. We produced the report and out of that report about thirty community residents who wanted to be engaged (about three hundred attended the conference), came together and we supported the formation of a group and together we provided resources and support to make sure that the initiative was being formed and it was called Jane Finch On The Move and Jane Finch On The Move eventually developed to become a fully independent resident led group with its own focus. Jane Finch On The Move still exists and they published a book with stories of community residents so they are focusing mostly around those kinds of experiences but most of the anti-poverty, social justice work that is more public is now done by JFAAP.
In 2008, in the summer, Jane/Finch Centre reached out to other organizations proposing that we come together to push for anti-poverty issues for the community residents. About thirty – thirty-five organizations and community residents came together and formed an organizing committee to organize an action - a protest for October 17th, 2018 and they called that Jane/Finch Action Against Poverty. That event got good attention not only by the media but also by partners across the city, youth and other community members and out of that the JFAAP was formed. Lots of people thought it should continue so we had a follow up meeting where many attended and they all felt this action was needed. The last time we had an action like that where people had shut down the intersection, was during the Mike Harris era – the Metro Days of Action. So, lots of people thought we needed this, we needed to have our own voices, that we can’t just have downtown activism. We also needed to have activism in Jane Finch to address concrete needs of the community, so they decided to continue, keeping the name as JFAAP and developing that into a resident-led, grass-root community organization.
JFAAP has been meeting for ten years now and they decided to not have a formal structure purposefully because they experienced a couple of other organizations where there was more structure and they eventually become harder to function and had internal issues. They decided to be fluid in terms of everyone who were community residents could become members. At an average meeting around forty to fifty people attend but last year they decided to have a little more formal system and they are working on it this year. They are developing a membership form now for anyone who lives or works in the community can become a member at $2.00 a year just as a token of support and then every 6 months they are going to have an election of about 20 members who become the organizing committee. So, they have a monthly meeting but every 6 months they elect twenty people to lead activities in the next six months. They have just started a pilot to see how this works and then they are going to have the next election in September. Jane/Finch Centre has provided a lot of support along with BCCHC. CLASP has provided support from the very beginning but because they are a student-based organization sometimes their priorities change so they are not right now providing on-going support, but they work with us on things like the temp agency campaign.
What other initiatives are you proud of and where you played a leadership role?
As you know, Jane/Finch Centre is committed to the community development approach and we try to stay, as much as possible, behind the scenes, not to be looked at as leaders but as community organizers and facilitators. So, for instance the Toronto Strong Neighbourhood Strategy (TSNS), we played a huge role from the very beginning even before the Jane Finch TSNS Task Force was formed. The City decided not to consult in Jane Finch when they wanted to come up with the improvement areas and the Jane/Finch Centre played a huge role in partnership with Action for Neighbourhood Change (ANC) and also JFAAP. So, open letters were sent to the City by JFAAP about the fact that they excluded Jane Finch despite Jane Finch being one of the priority neighbourhoods. The city backed down and said they would do a community consultation in Jane Finch, but we knew the city wouldn’t be reaching out to the community members and if we don’t do the work ourselves, we might end up with only twenty or thirty people. We teamed up together, did door-to-door outreach, went to youth groups, seniors, parent groups – more than three hundred people attended the consultation. It was more than the combination of the total of all other consultations across the city in terms of the number of people who attended.
We played a significant role in terms of formulating issues, supporting the outreach and providing background information for lots of residents. That was very successful in terms of pushing the city and making sure the city recognizes its huge mistake. They officially said that they underestimated the community and should have never underestimated Jane Finch and out of that we continued to meet, and we worked together like yourself (Wanda) was heavily involved, BCCHC, CLASP and also York University Community Engagement Centre along with a professor and students from York to do community-based research. We did lots of resident-led focus groups, did community-based research and a report was produced which talked about what community residents wanted to see in Jane Finch by 2020. That helped to give a direction, a mandate to the Jane Finch TSNS Task Force in terms of the work that needs to be done. It was a strong mandate around social development, economic opportunities, social justice, addressing numerous issues from temp agencies, workers’ rights, minimum wage, healthy lives in terms of food, public transit which helped us also to form alliances during this time with groups like TTC Riders and the Fair Wage Coalition, etc. So, every time we get involved with some of these issues, we end up getting involved in other campaigns because they are all intersecting – kind of overwhelming in terms of the issues we are facing on all fronts.
What issues are residents facing today?
I would say that many of the issues that were raised, especially in that report (Jane Finch TSNS Taskforce), that report really responded to the focus groups – the focus groups was about community residents’ views, and community residents attended and participated in those groups – the same kind of issues that the Task Force report indicated around the same thing issues of poverty, especially lack of good jobs – good paying jobs, the issue of temp agencies in the community is still very overwhelming. We’ve done lot of outreach in the community like at 5:00 in the morning, seeing hundreds of community residents going to the 905 areas because there aren’t jobs in the community. JFAAP, with support from ANC around some of the funding aspects of it, BCCHC as well as CLASP, we wanted to tackle this issue. We had done work on temp agencies for years. We knew lots of people in the community who worked at temp agencies, but we decided that we would do even more outreach. Instead of doing door-to-door, this time we said let’s go to places where people are being picked up by temp agency buses and vans to go to work.
Many people go to the temp agencies from 4:00 – 8:00 o’clock in the morning and 3:00 – 5:00 in the afternoon. About fifteen of us, mostly community residents and activists got together at about 5:00 in the morning and some afternoons, especially around the Jane and Steeles intersection – the four parts of the intersection with lots of coffee , talking to people around the issues, giving them flyers, talking to them about their rights and as a result of that we observed that hundreds of people, including newcomers, women, all different generations are actually getting up in the morning, walking to this intersection or coming from different buses to go to the 905 area for work and having to pay double fare. Most of the temp agencies, we called all of the temp agencies in the area, and the thing with the temp agencies is that some of them keep changing, they shut down and then re-open under different names. We called more than fifty of them and found that none of them were providing any jobs in the JF area. They were providing jobs in other parts of the city.
That also shows the unavailability of jobs in Jane-Finch and that also the fact that community residents looking for jobs, they have to travel most of the time. So, we also did a number of workshops, we did interviews with residents who had experience working for temp agencies. Two reports have been produced out of that. One led by CLASP in partnership with JFAAP, the Jane/Finch Centre and another one led by community residents and produced by JFAAP in the coming months. Those reports are about the experience working in temp agencies. We are hoping that some changes will happen as a result of Bill 148 that was approved last November. Now we’re not sure if there will be changes so are we going to see more accountability on the part of temp agencies or are they going to be unleashed again? So, these are things we have to see.
The temp agency work is huge in this area of the city and that also brings back the issue of lack of job creation, youth job creation in this part of the city which is a major problem. Access to healthy food continues to be an issue, housing continues to be a major issue – all the buildings in the area are in a state of disrepair. Even the condominium on the corner of Jane and Shoreham is falling apart. It’s a total disregard of the housing in this part of the city which is really mind-boggling in terms of what the politicians have been doing at the different levels of government. If there is anything else, I want to add around things like the high cost of TTC – we continue to work with the Fair Fare Coalition and TTC riders. There is a report that the city has come up with a low-fare pass. Most people have not been able to access it but it’s only a few dollars lower than the regular price, so the campaign is calling for much lower rates.
Social justice, equity, racism are important issues for you, but it doesn’t seem like things have changed enough to make a difference. As a community development worker, how do you deal with that?
One thing that I think is very important is that the work we do is local buts it’s within the global context as well, within a city context, a provincial context and a global context. The bigger context is that we haven’t seen many progressive movements and that’s also scary. So, the whole neo-liberal and capitalist agenda is not just affecting Jane-Finch, its affecting the whole province, across Canada but also, we are now seeing the rise of these right-wing populist movements that have no regard for the responsibility of governments except towards the businesses and corporations, So, we see the rise of Trump in the United States and that’s happening in Canada and Ontario and in the city as well. The bigger context is very important because no matter how you are going to try we also have to do what we have to do – we have to make sure we build alliances and relationships across the city and even the province and see what else is going on because, while at the same time knowing that it’s important to see specific improvements in the Jane Finch area.
Jane Finch has historically been excluded but now we see more neighbourhoods across the city of Toronto that are dealing with poverty and racism and exclusion. There are different reports like the Three Cities Report that shows that since the 1970’s, neighbourhoods with middle income has been shrinking and neighbourhoods with 20 – 40% below poverty is growing vastly. Jane Finch is solidly one of those neighbourhoods along with so many other neighbourhoods. The neighbourhoods with higher income, rich neighbourhoods have been able to become richer and more affluent. It’s a bigger issue so if you don’t have this picture or perspective. It can really become demoralizing and we would actually give up.
I think we all have to take a look at the bigger picture to ensure we align ourselves but also to have self-care which is hard for all of us and to have collective care is very important – something that I noticed. Lots of community residents who are active and also active on so many fronts but also, they have to find jobs, they have to deal with family issues, they become tired and frustrated, they get burned out. We have to make sure that they are supported as well. We have to work around how we can collectively care for community members and activists to ensure this struggle continues. It’s not just one day; the short-term victories are very important like for instance, the $15 Fairness Campaign which we led in this part of the city, led in Jane Finch by us through many years. The fact that we got $14 minimum wage, and some have 1.6 million of working people in this province benefited, tens of thousands of people around here as well – these are good signs and it also shows that ongoing campaigning and organizing can be beneficial as well.
At the same time, we have to take a look at how elections are affecting people as well and this particular election in Ontario, with the election with a right-wing conservative government, it’s going to hugely affect working class and racialized people. How to organize and how to understand it better and how to respond to that to make sure that that wouldn’t happen again. That’s very important.
How would you define the term Racialization of Poverty?
Racialization of poverty is kind of a new terms. I remember when my daughter used it in one of her essays at high school, her English teacher said that this term is not in the vocabulary – not a correct term. If you go to the dictionary, no although I’m not sure if it’s a term that’s been accepted but it’s used a lot in the last ten years by activists, especially anti-racist activists. That has to do with the fact that like for instance in the context of Canada and Toronto. So, we know that poverty has been growing but in many areas in Ontario, especially in the big cities – Toronto and the GTA, we have also observed that the rate of poverty of racialized people like people of colour, non-whites and immigrants has increased significantly comparing to Canadian born or the white populations. So that is why we have seen campaigns such as the Colour of Poverty that shows that poverty has colour – people of colour have been most affected. Racialization of poverty by other people of non-European background and how they have been negatively affected based on the diversity of race, ethnic background and colour, nationality, refugee status and the language. In Toronto the majority of neighbourhoods that are dealing with extreme forms of poverty are racialized. Jane-Finch is a good example of that, so we are working on anti-poverty work and social justice work as it’s important to challenge the specific forms of racialization of poverty.
In what ways have you worked with and leveraged support and resources from York University?
Working with York University has been complex and complicated as you know. It’s a huge institution; there are all kinds of tendencies. The relationship from my experience and concern has been up and down. The most successful one is the ones where they aren’t coming with their own agenda and they are very collaborative in terms of coming as allies. Like for instance, we have a very good relationship with the York university Faculty Association – Community Projects. They have community support initiatives that they have been providing financial support to some of the anti-poverty work and grassroots engagement in the community, especially to JFAAP, but also, they’ve been supporting community events. Some things had not been working like with the University newspaper when they started blaming sexual assaults at York, saying that all these sexual assaults happened at York because they are next to Jane-Finch.
When groups in the community, grassroots groups such as JFAAP issued a public statement, all of these groups like YUFA, CUPE 30903, the graduate student association, OPIRG – all of them issued a statement of support to condemn that but unfortunately York administration, didn’t condemn that which was a step backwards in terms of our relationship. We have been able to collaborate with York’s Community Engagement Center (CEC). When they opened the storefront in York Gate mall, out in the heart of the community, they have been providing the space and resources to the community and the partnership has been working well. They also understand collaboration and they have been very careful not to impose and they have been acting as partners, collaborators but also resource providers which has been very good. But also, they helped us with an initiative around research in the community by York - there are so many professors and researchers doing work in the community. So, we work with the CEC and with partners to form something called Jane Finch Research Partnership Initiative and we have developed a protocol to make sure that the research by York researchers and hopefully by other universities are going to go through this as well so that there is no harm to community members and more accountability to the community around that. It’s a project that we are working on now and hopefully will be finalized this fall.
Like the research we did on the Jane Finch TSNS Task Force, we got support from researchers from York which was very helpful and also working with community legal aid services program (Clasp) with public legal education, legal cases, also around temp agencies and workers’ rights – they have been very effective. There are also lots of activists at York who have been willing to provide resources which has been very positive. We’ve had lots of York groups and partners so let me give you an example of the length of the strike and all that – there are so many partners including unions we work with and are unhappy with the York administration. That strike had an impact in terms of York’s image in the community in terms of a negative impact.
What do you find challenging in this work?
We are working on so many issues; there is a bigger cause and a long-term commitment is crucial, and you work with people from where they are at and people who get involved may have to move on in their lives. You have to respect that throughout the years, we’re worked with so many people who have come and gone. We’ve had students who have worked with us and then they are gone. We’ve had volunteers come here and then they are gone. Partnerships are formed and then people from a different organization comes and loves to work with us but then that person is gone and the whole partnership is gone with them. That’s been happening with York for instance and even other institutions. We work with them, progressive people come with a passion to work in Jane Finch, but they get a better job, or they move on and the whole thing goes with them. We always have two steps forward and one step backward throughout the years and that’s one aspect of community development – the impact has a very long term and also working with partners, funders and the way that they work. There is no agenda for short-term solutions, numbers and statistics – community development is about process as well, it’s about working with people, taking the time and organizing for long-term impact. All of these are frustrating as well and I would say that around the issue of self-care and how to find the balance between your own self-care and the collective self-care and how much of it is real, how much of it is possible, especially when you see people out in the community being affected and especially now, these days all these attacks and racist insults coming to Jane Finch and those of us organize the work with the community, we have to be able to work with others and to respond to that. Its’ very challenging but at the same time, we do the work.
In terms of the work, Jane/Finch Centre has only two people doing community work, me and Clare who is a Neighbourhood Builder worker which is mostly focused on ANC and that’s it. The rest of our staff are for program delivery which is mostly dictated by the funders. BCCHC has Community Health Workers and I noticed they are trying to work more from a social determinants of health perspective which I’m hoping to see that broadened from the immediate health issues so hopefully will see more involvement from them but then again I’ve noticed that many organizations in the area – they are not getting bigger but shrinking or they have moved out of the immediate JF area. And then small groups like the Jane Finch Concerned Citizens have no funding. Remember, we did that work around comparing the resources around Jane-Finch to downtown and other areas and about Jane-Finch getting resources but we’re not getting community-based resources. We’re not getting resources for this kind of work. In that sense, how much can we do – working around grassroots organizing and supporting community resident’s, providing resources so that community residents can become spokespeople for the community and voices and all that is the way to go. Even with that, it’s impossible to do this with just a couple of people organizing. It’s a challenge – we have fewer resources to do this kind of work.
What are you most proud of?
I’m proud of the Jane-Finch community as a whole. I’m proud of the work and the amount of activism you see in Jane-Finch despite all of the systemic issues and barriers – police issues, racism, poverty, insulting attacks – all these negative comments you see everywhere. But still you see organizing happening. It’s interesting because many other parts of the city even say that they see the organizing that happens in Jane-Finch. It continues; it stays. I’ve been thinking in terms of knowing the Jane/Finch Centre has a commitment to support the community in doing this kind of work, but you have to see how we could have – if you got additional funding to have another community development worker.
I totally understand that we can’t expect people to live in the community and work in the community all their lives. There are not many people like that. I’m hoping we would be able to have someone else come in and with a commitment of five years or ten years – is so hard to know but if you work with someone, if the Centre hired somebody else – another community development worker and that person is committed to stay for a longer period of time then that would be great. Maybe a younger person, and someone who has lived in the community or planning to live in the community and want to organize in the community and then we would support that person and hopefully they would continue. Jane/Finch Centre has contributed to community development work in so many different ways and I know that there have been times with some of the actions Jane/Finch Centre wouldn’t put their name just because some of the actions were too strong. We are the only neighbourhood based, resident led organization with resources to support the social justice work.
What has the community taught you?
I’ve been able to learn about history, definitely and the importance of lived experiences. I’m already coming from a strong activist background, knowledge of system issues but the lived experiences of people in Jane-Finch and how people have been able to organize and organize their own lives, do things within their own buildings, in their own neighbourhoods and reach out to others. It’s been amazing for me in so many different ways. Helping me to be humble and being appreciative of the community. Another thing I think that level of passion i in terms of passion for the community and the fact that people like their community – it’s amazing. I mean with all those things people say about Jane-Finch, you could actually walk, and I’ve done it many times at around 9:00 – 10:00 at night, you see people walking, people sitting around and talking. Yes, there are issues but there is so much positivity as well. Another thing the community taught me is that people don’t usually trust politicians, systems and governments and all that but it’s because of their lived experiences. When I work in the community, I have to make sure that whatever I do is consistent with values of the community, otherwise I’m going to be undermining our organizing work.
What is your fondest memory of working in the community?
This is hard to say but it’s a combination of things. I think that JFAAP was very significant work in ten years and I’m hoping that the fact they want to go to a different stage of expanding – hopefully that will help, especially now with the next four years, all the things that we see. During this time, also help with some of the broader worker organizing, union organizing, and I think that was valuable in so many ways in terms of the value of organizing as a whole. I think that the great potential for organizing in Jane-Finch and the support for that and appreciation for that and also one of the things that the love and respect when you go to the meetings – the elders, the young people and the kind of things that you see and the interaction that you see. I’ve worked with other organizations across the city and this is very unique in this part of the city.