Leticia Deawuo

Leticia was a community resident of the Jane-Finch community and the Director of the Black Creek Community Farm. Moving here from Ghana to join her family in 1996, Leticia was involved as both a dedicated volunteer and as a worker for about 12 years. Leticia, who strongly believes that we must focus on systemic issues to improve issues facing residents in Jane Finch, is dedicated to building capacity and improving conditions. Leticia is a mother of two wonderful children and as of the interview in 2015, she was a part-time student at York University working on her master’s degree in Environment Studies.

Please start by telling me a bit about yourself and how you came to live in the Jane-Finch community.

My family immigrated here in 1993 from Ghana and I came here 1996 so I joined my mom and her husband and two other siblings in 1996. Long story short, when I were living here as a teenager, I went to school at Oakdale Middle School and my sister was at Yorkwoods Public School. My mom, of course, sheltered us a lot and to use the community centre was not good because she felt that community centres was where all the bad kids hung out. That was her piece and she wanted to raise good kids by keeping us cooped us in the house all the time and rightfully so. I think she just didn’t feel that it was safe and for the most part, they would leave us alone, so it was me and my sister mostly on our own in the summer when they were working two factory jobs to keep the family running and they wanted to make sure we were safe.

The only space she allowed us to go to was to the library – Yorkwoods Public Library and we would go to Yorkwoods Library because for her it meant that we were learning, we were studying. So, for most of my teenage life, I did not venture into community centres or get involved in wider conversations around my community. We just understood things as kids that things were happening, and I never really understood what it actually meant. One day, I will never forget, sitting in front of 2775 Jane Street, where we lived, and then watching a cop actually on the grass on the side of Yorkwoods School. At the time, they didn’t have the fenced off area and having a cop chasing, literally, a young man while in a cruiser and I remember seeing that and all we heard from the police cruiser was them using some sort of megaphone or something like that saying, “get off the park” and us just running back into the building and from there, I thought that maybe this is why my mom said not to go into community centres and things like that.

I was in college when I got more involved and I had been learning a lot. I took Social Service Work and I was learning a lot about understanding issues from a micro to a macro level and I started organically analysing my own situation, my own background and where I come from then realizing that actually, we were poor. That didn’t occur to me because the idea of poverty, the way I view poverty is that you were living on the street, you were homeless, you have no food to eat, you begging, right? So, for me, that is what was meant by being poor and then learning that we were poor and then learning about how people become poor from a very systemic level. For my first placement, I chose the Jane/Finch Centre to do my placement and from there, getting involved in a bit of community work and activism with the community development team. I think that was back in 2006 or 2007.

When you completed college, what was your first job?

My first job was at the Jane/Finch Centre working with Farid (Community Development Coordinator) to organize Jane Finch Getting On. At the time, it was a collaborative between the Afghan Association, Black Creek CHC – I remember Cheryl Prescod was at the table, and a few other organizations that I don’t remember but it was around organizing Jane Finch Getting On. That was one of the first projects that I remember, and it was about getting community together to discuss the multiple challenges and issues that we face and then look at the different ways that the community could come up with a response to that.

From your perspectives, what issues were residents facing in the community at that time?

At the time, the issues were around education, the state of housing in the community. It was around the criminalization of youth and it was around employment. I remember there were five and I can’t remember the fifth one but those are the four I remember. The role I played was really getting residents engaged in the conversations and getting them to participate so a lot of the work I did at the time was community outreach. Literally, we had multiple forms of outreach – tables in the malls, door to door flyering, and one of the ones that I truly enjoyed was that one-on-one conversation with people around why they should attend the event and why it was important. As somebody who was young, straight out of college with a lot of passion and yes, we could do something and then you talk to older folks in the community and they say, nothing ever changes in this community; do you know how long we’ve been talking about this – forever!

It was interesting for me and it didn’t kill my passion for it and I just felt like there was something that we, as community can still do to one – bring about political accountability and to also challenge the system that keeps the situation in place.

Tell me about your perspective as a resident/worker with regards to the politics of this community.

For me, the issues that the community face are systemic. Over the years, I think I have grown as a person going from “Oh, maybe with individual effort we can change things.” I think there’s so much more in the community we can do with the limited resources in our hands but I think politically and systemically, if the structures don’t change then nothing we do at the bottom is going to mean anything if we just focus on just us because if we focus on just us then we’re forgetting that the issues are systemic. The make-up of the community didn’t just happen, right? It was something that somebody from somewhere just pulled together to develop the community in the way that it is.

The thought that most of the people living in the community, our high immigrant community and the fact that we have over a hundred temp agencies in our community. The Workers Action Network studied the area from Steeles all the way to Wilson and Bathurst to Islington and in the bigger broader community, there are that many, even on Steeles alone. Like I was walking along Steeles and I was surprised how many temp agencies existed in one plaza alone. And then you see the sign boards of course. There are so many temp agencies operating in our community and recruiting people from the community so in terms of accessing employment, this is what people have access to.

In terms of resources, if you look at the community centres that we have and the community centres’ that exist in other neighbourhoods, it differentiates in terms of what is offered to people versus what is offered to our community. As someone who has lived here since I was 12 years old, and as someone who works here, someone who raises my children here, one, I believe my community is very safe. I walk here at night if we are talking about safety. I don’t mean that violence doesn’t exist, but violence is everywhere, even across the city as we learned what’s happening in the City this summer. I find it interesting when other people are talking about my community that they don’t live in or they didn’t grow up in. Maybe they just did a drive through to get to somewhere and talk about it as being unsafe. Or talk about it in ways that I also know is manufactured because media needs sensation – they need something that sells and for us, the stories that tend to sell and generate a lot of traffic for them is whenever there’s a shooting. That happens here in our community. I think our community is safe, a community that I’m proud of. It’s a community like no other, it’s a community that I have a lot of social networks, it’s a community that’s very resilient and supports each other in ways that isn’t talked about. The different ways that people lean on each other and support each other, in ways that doesn’t make it out there in the public realm.

What issues are you proud of and where you played a leadership role?

One thing I have to say is I think the work the Jane/Finch Centre does around community development has had a huge impact. I think that not just for myself but for a lot of people in the community. A lot of organizations shy away from supporting resident-led initiatives, Jane/Finch Centre stays true to it and through that they have been able to build resident capacity for leadership. Even within my role as a placement student, I also did a lot of volunteer work with different aspects of the organization. I think through that if Jane/Finch Centre was able to do a video to follow people who had either volunteered or have been inspired or they had done something, you will find people over the years who have been impacted by that work, especially through the community development team in terms of how we shape them politically in their work.

You have many groups that have formed. I think the Jane-Finch community as a whole is the most engaged community in terms of resident engagement and community development than in any other city. And I think largely its because of the work of the Jane/Finch Centre. If Farid left, it would be a huge loss – the work that he’s done like Jane Finch On The Move, which I’m a founding member of and the Jane Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP). Even my own group that I started, Mothers in Motion focusing on fitness and probably other groups I can’t even think of like.

I think one of the interesting pieces with the work that the Jane/Finch Centre does in recognizing the impact is that its not just one centre that you go to. The fact that you can go to 15 Tobermory, 415 Driftwood, 2999 Jane, then you have the Jane Finch Mall (Early Years Centre) and the Yorkgate Mall (The Spot). It makes it so different that people from different walks of life are able to connect with the same organization but in many different ways. It also means that the Centre can reach more people and to be more imbedded in the community, unlike another organization that just has one location that you go to for a service and then you leave. I think that just the way it set up, even though it might not have been intentional, it just uses of space and different ways to connect with community members I think has worked really well and hopefully they will continue that or to look at different ways to improve it to make it better. But I think that’s what has really helped.

So, out of Jane Finch Getting On, came Jane Finch On the Move and I remember going through the list of all the attendees and I think it was one of the biggest community gatherings we’ve had in a long time where we had over 250 people. There was a booklet that we developed out of it and out of that number of people, we called people for another meeting and that meeting happened at Driftwood Community Centre and then we had another meeting at Oakdale Community Centre. Oakdale was where Jane Finch On The Move was born. I was there along with Ziggy, Angelo, Butterfly and a few other folks that was involved in that work as well and it was really beautiful to see something come out of a big event and people asking, “what next?”

How do we carry this work forward and I think anyone that can do such an event and get that, has done well? Some people left and never called back but most people wanted to be more engaged. Then also the birth of JFAAP. JFAAP came out of the conversation we were having. Every year, we fill up a bus and go downtown, and we join OCAP (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty) and other organizations for the International Day of the Elimination of Poverty – October 17th. We realized that while we faced poverty, how do we raise awareness here at home and look at ways that we could build capacity and get more people involved. JFAAP has been around for 10 years, this year so in 2008, we got together, and we invited folks from downtown and said why don’t you join us here in Jane-Finch as well and let’s do something. In March we closed down the corner of Jane Finch. It was dangerous, but we actually got traffic to stop, and for people to read our signs and to see what’s happening and then came the birth of JFAAP.

What has been your experience and/or perspective of policing in Jane-Finch?

I come at it from a very systemic and political analysis of what the police is and what the police mean and why the police came about and who the police are here to protect and to keep in check. So, to be real, the police were not made to serve and protect low-income people. The police were made to protect the interest of the rich and to protect their property from the poor. I think if we look historically, this system was set up to be against low income people and in the context of North America, low income people are racialized and indigenous people and to keep them away from the rich and the ruling class property and to protect them and serve them then you already know how a disaster is made to be. And it goes to explain why we have police in some neighbourhoods and in some neighbourhoods, we don’t.

The idea is that the criminals only exist in the poor neighbourhoods and they are the only ones up to bad things and the rich, they are just, you know, out of their own gratitude, are here to serve the rest of us, or when they want to give us a little trickle of their money. So, for me, I come from that perspective to that the police are not here for us. They were never here. I think, yes, we can, and this doesn’t mean that individual police officers are either bad or good, I’m talking about the system in itself. From that perspective it makes it very hard to build any sort of tangible relationship with the police and the community. It doesn’t matter how many basketball tournaments and things you have, how are they going to understand that young person that stole something from the store is not a bad kid.

That comes from one other systemic issue of where poverty is the reality. At the end of the day, the individual police officer who comes to arrest him, is doing his job and his job is to book this kid, especially if they are a repeated offender which then ends up on his record when then has a long-lasting life impact. I feel like no matter what, and this is just my personal opinion, that no matter what we do, it’s the system that was set up and the system isn’t set up if you look at policing from different parts of the world – it’s the same. They are all set up the same way. Each country has their own issues.

I was reading from Ghana where a young mother and her child were brutalized by police officers. So, police brutality in the states, in Canada, in Africa and other parts of the world is the same issue that people have with them because structurally, that’s how they are set up. In terms of this community, I think if we don’t change things systemically the work with individual officers – yes, they are nice officers, some of them are nice, some of them are just bad but they all represent the same institution.

What issues are residents facing today and what are the challenges in supporting residents deal with those issues?

I think the issues over the years, if we speak to somebody who moved here in the 80’s to someone who moved here now, I think the issues are going to be about the same around employment, housing, poverty, you know, it’s the same but one of the things that is interesting that is happening now is gentrification of the community. We have four subway stations which is great but if you look on a map where the subway stations are set up and where the developments are taking place, you realize very quickly that the subways were not made for poor people in this community because the subways go around the community. One of the crazy ones was why pioneer village? I get the subway at York and Keele and Finch but why the Pioneer Village station and then I learn that condos are developing around there in the next few years and now that makes sense to me – it’s made for development. So, they are changing the community not for the people who are currently living here, its for the people who they hope to come and live here.

This is essentially what has happened here in creating that atmosphere for those with money to come in. My rent is ridiculous right now and it doesn’t include hydro or gas. While its great compared to downtown, its very high for this area and then you learn the high rates of evictions at 10 San Romanoway as an example. Its like slowly and surely and now you have a politician from our community who is very much in support of gentrification and have ad’s saying that, with a hammer – I don’t know if you’ve seen that ad – Mammoliti’s ad where he has a hammer standing in front of a townhouse? We have politicians that are very much in support of this because he is looking more for the BIA’s, right? I think that is some of things that are happening that’s very scary – families being pushed out of the community.

One of the things I’ve noticed is yes, we have poverty, you’ve never had so many people out on the street literally begging for money. I’ve seen an increase in that at almost every intersection – and not even intersections but parking lots. People asking for money and begging for money to feed themselves. I feel like the gap between the rich and poor is getting wider and wider and its going to be very common to see people on the street begging for money and for food to eat.

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 resident and a worker, how do you deal with that?

One of the things that I’ve been doing more towards my parenting is how to raise conscious kids. I understand that the work that I’m doing is important and I never stop organizing in wherever I have a voice to be able to speak. I try my best to highlight that the issues in our community are systemic. But also, as a parent, I want to raise conscious kids. I want to raise kids that can understand on a systemic level about what’s happening around the world and what it means locally and how they too can be aware and also able to make their own decisions in terms of next steps. Of course, I don’t want to be the parent that says, this is the direction, or this is sort of the way it needs to go but I suppose with my children, it will help navigate them in this world a bit better and to build, hopefully, something.

I still live in this community and issues impact me on a daily basis. I work with issues around food security in terms of my job, but I also deal with food security as well, living in this community. So, I live it everyday and as a resident I try to find different ways to mitigate that and to connect with other parents as well who are either struggling and build that support with each other to move forward. I guess that’s how you sort of deal with it and then continue organizing and supporting JFAAP whenever I can with some of the work and also on the Black Creek Food Justice Network, whenever I can as well. I don’t think the fight is ever done and I don’t think the fight will ever be done in my generation or the next generation to come.

What are you most proud of and what has the community taught you?

One of the things that in going to different communities, one of the things I realize that what is very unique about the community is the level of resident leadership. If you go to Firgrove, if you go to Grandravine, you go to Shoreham, you go to the different pockets of the community, you will find people that are leaders, that are fighting in their own ways for their community and fighting to bring in resources to their community for their kids or even giving their own time to do after school programs, to do soccer programs or to do whatever that they do and I think its that type of leadership and that type of resiliency in spite of all the gazillion things that have been thrown at them. I think its something that – its unfortunate that some people have to do that, but I think that is something that I am most proud of. I can walk down the street and I can meet my child’s teacher and people are very well connected.

Any other fond memories?

I remember we had a march to the Ontario Disability Support Program and the Ontario Works office. I don’t remember the year, but it was raining, and it was cold. I think it was October and we all had ponchos on and we thought, oh my God – its raining and people are not going to show up. But people came. It was about the way that particular office receives complaints about how they treat people even going in to meet their worker. Its already enough, I think, it takes a lot of guts to visit an office like that and the stigma that is attached to it but then to have staff that treat you badly as well. We marched, and it was a rainy day and there was over 150 people who showed up that day. We marched through the rain, we had the youth group that was doing some theatre performances to keep everybody’s mood up and people were really pumped and passionate. For me, I have to say that was one of the memorable moments for me.

Another memorable moment I had as a child was that there used to be a swimming pool at the Yorkwoods Community Centre, now the Salvation Army and there’s a basketball court there. That was one of the fun memories that I have because we weren’t allowed to go anywhere but we could go there and because we were scared – my mom was scared of water bodies (swimming pools), we would go there and just sit there and just kick our legs in the water. That was a fun memory for me and my sister to just be able to go to that pool and to just kick our feet in the water and then go home – a fun childhood memory in Jane-Finch.