Sabrina (Butterfly) GoPaul

Butterfly is a community resident of the Jane-Finch community and a Community Health Worker for the Black Creek Community Health Centre. She has contributed to this community as a dedicated volunteer and worker for over 18 years (as of 2018), with a commitment to build the capacity of residents and to improve conditions in the Jane/Finch community. Butterfly is also a journalist, working with and contributing articles to Jane-Finch.com and a mother to two wonderful sons. Butterfly is passionate about social justice and eager to build community.

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

My parents are from Guyana and they came into this country in the 70’s. I was born in Regent Park and in the early 80’s, my family – my mom, my dad, myself and my brother and sister, we moved to this neighbourhood. We lived in a house on Derrydown so that’s what brought us here in the mid-80’s. At that time, both my parents were working-class people. My mom was a seamstress/accountant and my dad did a lot of survival kind of work so taxi to construction, window-covering, that kind of stuff.

How did you initially get involved in the community and how long have you been volunteering and working in the Jane-Finch community?

I started volunteering locally in my building so probably early 2000 - 2001, working and volunteering very closely in the building I live in – 15 Tobermory. It wasn’t really in a structured kind of way, it was creating opportunities for my son and my son had friends in the building, so it was just doing events and fundraising to do different things in the neighbourhood. I became the tenant representative as well. But before all that, it was really about supporting my son and his friends and creating opportunities and bringing activities to the neighbourhood - getting the kids out of the neighbourhood. It really was about supporting my son and my son had peers and I knew that to build healthy relationships is looking at community in that way and supporting my son and his friends. That’s where it all started.

My response was really in response to Isaiah (my son) so though I lived in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood growing up, my parents split when I was fairly young, and it caused a lot of pressure in our home. My mom was dealing with a lot of trauma and having a difficult time raising myself who was almost a teenager – kind of rebelling. My parents split up, so I had gotten kicked out when I was fourteen. I moved into a group home down by the St. Clair and Christie area and I think that those experiences living in a group home, being a young woman being marginalized living in a group home and the stigma that was attached to that, I think that’s the lived experience that I started to respond to. I was living in a group home with very minimal resources in the group home. We were all young women dealing with different issues. I was also the youngest one as well, living in a group home with others who were sixteen and older. There was a path that got me to Tobermory. I lived in the shelter, I lived on the street and I think this context is the reason why I do the work I do. It was moving into a shelter after having Isaiah when I got into 15 Tobermory. It took a path before I got back into Jane-Finch although those years where I didn’t reside in the neighbourhood, it was a neighbourhood that I grew up in and I was really connected to. So, no matter how far I lived, I was always in Finch, going to C.W. Jefferies (high school), staying in the west end. I also grew up in the Lawrence West area and Neptune as well and then ended up back in Jane-Finch.

You had several jobs in the community prior to your current job as a Community Health Worker at Black Creek Community Health Centre. Can you please tell me about some of those experiences?

Work started happening in the neighbourhood in a few different ways. I was hired at the Jane/Finch Centre, around 2003 or 2004, and at the time it wasn’t named but I was hired to organize a forum to bring together residents and to talk about the political climate in the neighbourhood. It was dollars from Access and Equity (City of Toronto) so it was to develop this gathering and to bring people together to talk about the issues in the neighbourhood. I also got hired at the same time to work at Driftwood Community Centre to organize the Driftwood Festival. We were also connecting to the Anti-Racism Day at the Jane Finch Mall that I hosted, and I had done different activities there like the wellness. There were different ways that I was working with or volunteering with the Centre even before Jane Finch On the Move which is crazy because seeing the pictures of Farid (Community Development Worker at the Jane/Finch Centre) and I – its just a long time to have been working with people.

Jane Finch on The Move was years before Jane Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP) started. So, Jane Finch on the Move had dollars to do this forum and I got hired to coordinate that forum. It was bringing together local organizations and agencies and residents talk about the issues and we had this big forum. Black Creek CHC was involved, Jane/Finch Centre was involved and many others. So, that is when I started at the Jane/Finch Centre.

I think that on a City-wide level, I was also doing work with Schools Without Borders and that is when I went on an exchange. I went to Brazil and so I was doing international kind of community development work with young people, locally and globally. So, there was a bunch of different things all happening at the same time that started to move me in a particular direction. And then, journalism was also part of that mix when I got accepted at Humber College for journalism. It was all at the same time around the mid 2000’s where I was volunteering and working on the Driftwood Festival with the City of Toronto at the same time.

I think it was a really interesting time because I was making these connections locally with residents that were living very similar experiences to me. I think that when Mike Harris first came into my life (former Premier of Ontario, elected in 1995), I wasn’t connected as a resident in the Jane Finch neighbourhood although I was living here at the time. I remember being impacted by Mike Harris’s policy with Ontario Works, in particular and really struggling for the first time on social assistance. So, I was on social assistance before I had Isaiah, as a single person. I wasn’t struggling and suddenly having a child, it was really tough, and I remember watching TV and watching all these demonstrations happening downtown and I would get ready with Isaiah, decorate his stroller and go downtown and people would look at me weird in the Jane-Finch area with my placard. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I wasn’t connected to a group of people. This was just something that was impacting me and there were people making noise and maybe I should join them. I know its going all over the place, but I think that all these different experiences really grounded me in wanting something local, looking at actions and people and our experiences and knowing that I wasn’t by myself.

Everybody that I was connecting to in my neighbourhood were connecting on very similar issues. Connecting on very similar experiences of feeling excluded or being pushed out or being demonized in some way for being a single mom and not trying to get my life together. I think that with all these experiences happening all at one time, I was really determined to keep it in Finch. I’ve had many opportunities to leave Finch, even in terms of my career but it was always grounded in Finch – always been here.

Tell me about your experiences when you got involved with JFAAP.

JFAAP started with a conversation with local organizations and agencies and maybe a few residents that might have worn different hats or just a few residents that sat at the table at the time. It was all these issues happening in the neighbourhood, the policies were only getting worse and at the time, organizations and agencies are also feeling the pressure as well. Less money, more expectations. We also just moved away from where we couldn’t even say “advocacy” to a place where we were able to do some of the advocacy work and we started having a conversation about having an action in honour of the Eradication of Poverty in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood.

At that time, when we were talking about the last type of action that happened, prior to that was about 10 years ago during the Metro Days of Action as well where folks circled the Jane-Finch mall. We organized around that and we made banners, we distributed flyers, we did a lot of door to door outreach and over 300 people came out that day. There was young people and seniors, community workers and I think it was so powerful for me because it was here finally. After that action, residents wanted to continue to work, residents wanted for us to meet regularly and talk about these issues. This event brought together Nomansland, it brought together residents’ groups and arts groups. We were able to talk about poverty in a very creative and dynamic way in the neighbourhood.

Residents were really engaged in this conversation and we were meeting, at first weekly. This was in the old space of Jane/Finch Centre’s Action for Neighbourhood Change (ANC), on the 2nd floor of the Norfinch Plaza and some of those people are still with JFAAP – Errol, Audrey, about 8 – 12 of us that met regularly. There was nothing that existed like JFAAP, so we were also trying to figure out what is JFAAP as well in these discussions. Here are the issues but what does this look like in our neighbourhood. I think that was a big part of our conversations. But also, what was happening at that time, what we were hearing from residents was police brutality, what was happening in the raids and what was happening with the blatant disregard to people’s homes and the attack on community.

That was one of our first actions and after was organizing around police brutality and in particular, 31 Division. That was also a huge movement that happened. We got thousands of signatures, we had placards sent to the four corners of JF to get signed and we had all kinds of people supporting – people from York, residents, youth-led groups, arts groups in the neighbourhood and we went to 31 division and we had demands and it was the first time I have seen our neighbourhood organized and on the page but also very reactionary. We were able to respond very quickly, and we still didn’t know what JFAAP was – it was the first six months of JFAAP.

There was an incident or two that made us mobile at the time - I believe there was a raid that happened, and we were hearing from the Somali community that mothers and elders in the Somali community were being beaten up and brutalized in their homes. Children were being zipped-tied with their wrists and thrown behind cruisers. We heard that there was some kind of smoke-bomb that was thrown in a home and a little boy was burned on the side of his face. This was all around the time where there were police that came into the Jane Finch Mall and let off pepper spray or something or some kind of smoke out of a gun. There was a lot of friction and there was a build up and I think that’s what was happening. Just tightening policies and criminalizing different people, the coordination of security and the police in the neighbourhoods, but we were hearing a lot. And every day, people were seeing it and bearing witness, so it wasn’t just like the gangster just doing it but being in a mall and being impacted with the blatant disregard of people’s safety and wellness.

So, we were hearing it from different ways and I think with JFAAP’s membership - people living in different neighbourhoods, coming from different kinds of experiences, from a single mom to a young person, to somebody who goes to a program, we were hearing these stories so much that we were able to connect these people and their stories, and it was a difficult time.

Tell me about your first job experiences in the community.

A lot of it was contract work. I did work at East Metro for a little bit as well. Women Moving Forward was a contract and there was something I was doing there for awhile and the ANC. I was the Community Engagement Worker for ANC for a couple of years with Gillian Dennis (manager). I was there for that project until the dollars ended, and it ended right – I was literally in-between jobs for only a month and a half between working for the Jane/Finch Centre and coming to the Black Creek CHC. I started to work at Black Creek in 2010.

At the time, and from your perspective, what issues were residents facing in the community and how were you involved/engaged?

Police brutality for sure, poverty and also the issues around schools – parents and schools, child welfare, and I think the prison to pipeline was something that became very clear during that time - there’s a pipeline for Black and Brown children. I think these have been the issues. We know that within the prisons, Black people are disproportionally represented. From my experience as a young mom, there are a lot of things that came at Isaiah and I didn’t understand what was happening. I just felt really shitty all the time, I wasn’t competent, and everything was against me, not there to ensure our success. It was through supporting Isaiah that I figured out that I had to use their own policy against them. I had to understand how this educational institution works. And they had come at Isaiah in very different ways – they came at him behaviourally through academic in different ways to label him, I think. And then, child welfare started to come into our lives where another institution is investigating me and my parenting but usually holding poverty as a reason why I can’t take care of my family.

Connecting with families and seeing that this was a very common practice meant that many parents, many single moms were going through this. The work that I was doing as a volunteer but also my own personal work, I think to make those connections – I didn’t go to school for social work or community development. I was a high school drop-out. I did eventually get my high school diploma but how do you contextualize these things. I was my own self-education and spaces that I was in at the time through Schools Without Borders or some of the mentors that I had in my life like Farid, as well to be able to contextualize that these policies are demonizing bodies and understanding the history of racism, colonization and to understand the Indigenous story. This was my own personal learning and understanding the prison pipeline so that’s pretty much modern-day slavery and its to get Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples to be in prison to do free labour and how you do that? You make sure they are not educated, you make sure they’re criminalized, and pushed out of school because our friendly neighbourhood police will be there to provide you with another institution where you can do free labour. What’s scary is that these policies start to impact your life from the minute you give birth because the health care system could call Children’s Aid if they feel you aren’t supported and your young and they can make that call. From that point on, that institutions in your life, it leads you down a particular path.

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

My family moved here in the 80’s and during the 80’s, this community was all Liberals. My family are Caribbean, and they came into this country because of Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau gave my people, the Caribbean people, an opportunity to get this better life to be domestic workers. And that is what ended up happening – women were taking care of white people’s children and the kind of work they wanted you to do was more physical, manual work. If you were a professional from back home, you won’t be one here and I could have this conversation in modern day right now with my Dad and the loyalty is so intrenched. Even with his analysis, yes, it was an empty job market that we filled but this loyalty that my people have is very entrenched. So, with that said, in the 80’s we were a vibrant working-class community. We are a Brown family and we were in a home, homeowners. My family was able to do that. It probably wasn’t smooth sailing, but they don’t remember it being so hard or that we struggled. I mean there were social and other problems in our home and found that finances to be that and here we are – our community is in the worse shape ever (fast forward 30 years), our schools are falling apart, our physical homes and buildings, social housing buildings are falling apart. There’re no good long-term jobs, we have tons of temp agencies in our neighbourhood and if people had been doing their jobs in their elected positions, I don’t think we would be in the state we are in. Something has gone wrong and, its impacting racialized people and we know it is. We see it in the health outcomes, we see it in the education outcomes, we see it.

What’s sad is that we continue to vote in a particular way and what’s hopeful is that it taken ten years for the provincial vote to shift from Liberal to NDP in our neighbourhood. That I think is powerful but its also very honest. I’m sure people will say what they did and take credit for what they did and how it happened but for somebody who works on the ground I would say it took us ten years for us to really animate the issues and connecting it to who’s talking about the issues, when we are going through the elections. That took a long time – that took a lot of on the ground work, talking to people, community meetings, consultations, open letters, connecting with the media, using alternative media. Tons of tactics – collaboration, coalition building, all kinds of things for that shift to happen. But where we are now with the majority at the provincial government and what’s happening in the City of Toronto with the changes of Ward boundaries and all the work that ends up happening – the push for women to be more involved, for racialized people to be more involved, it’s a very scary time. Women’s voices are going to be excluded, racialized experiences are going to be excluded and that this is intentional. It’s a scary time we’re in.

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

I am very privileged that what I do as a resident and what I do as a Community Worker and what I am as a mother, I’m able to somehow – it all compliments each other and I’m somehow able to prop up the work in all the different capacities I’m in. I’m really proud that I’m supported by an organization where I’m able to be a resident, not on work time but I’m able to take up pieces as a resident that could impact my organization, especially in the political time we’re in. I’m really proud of the work that JFAAP has been able to do, the resident anti-poverty group for almost ten years and we’ll be celebrating our ten-year anniversary this October. We’ve had huge victories.

We were able to save our schools in our neighbourhoods where five schools were targeted for closure. We’ve been able to call out government when racist immigration policies have come down the pipe or being able to condemn politicians when they say the most heinous things about racializing working poor people. To be a part, again being able to look back at the work, the removal of police in high-schools in the Toronto District School Board.

Ten years ago, they were implemented in our schools with the death of Jordan Manners and ten years later, it took ten years to get them out of our schools. That was historic because it wasn’t about the majority, it was about people who have been targeted or who have been traumatized by the police presence in our schools and giving power to that experience. It’s a powerful thing to be a part of, in particular when we know how the police treat our young people in our neighbourhood. I think the 15 in Fairness Campaign, although its vulnerable, I think the activism and the energy and the fight for the 15 in Fairness in our neighbourhood really pushing back on temp agencies and that legislation – its vulnerable, the minimum wage. It’s law so its still something that we have to fight for in that legislation, a lot more work can happen but it’s a good start to really look at modern day exploitation of labour, of these people. I think that JFAAP has been able to hold people to the fire and be timely and responsive. I don’t think that there’s anything like JFAAP in the City of Toronto – I’m proud of that.

I’m also proud of the work that I have been able to do on JaneFinch.com. As a community journalist, to be able to do honour to people’s stories but to be a vehicle to tell people’s stories and in a way, they want to tell their story is through lived experience, not just sound-bites but in meaningful deep ways that we can understand how issues impact peoples lives through race or income or gender. To be able to have a platform to tell peoples stories, to talk about the issues in a real way. I still contribute pieces to the site – our politics might be a bit different but at least I have a home for the stories.

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

I think poverty, racism – there’s a huge population in this neighbourhood and with folks who have no status, precarious status or undocumented. I think immigration is something that maybe in ten years, five years, it hasn’t been as prevalent in the work I do but immigration and peoples status or precarity in status – if we think about somebody who have some income and housing but still able to get social assistance, still able to be on a waiting list for social housing – I’m talking about a population that has no access at all. I think these are the issues that really divide our community, that pit one another against each other that I think its these policies that do this. So, in a neighbourhood like Jane-Finch where you have high rates of poverty and exclusion and the push-out rates and all different kinds of health outcomes and you think about people who are undocumented, it really shifts the work that we are doing. If you think, there’s no humanity – undocumented people would almost be invisible to survive. If we talk about temp agencies and better job protection it really puts them in more of a precarious position. There is no protection for people with no status, they get screwed around with their cheques, they won’t get their money, they get threatened, there’s a lot of psychology work here that’s happening.

Housing is another crisis we’re in. The waiting list for Toronto Housing is fifteen years long, housing right now, the market rent in the neighbourhood is prohibited. Someone on social assistance who is a single person can’t find accommodations with the money they get for shelter. Housing connects with income, so I think the issues could be seen as the same, but the crisis and pressures is worse and the level of policing and surveillance, I think is just going to exasperate the issue.

Mental health, I think over the last ten or fifteen years, there’s been a lot of work in talking about mental health and trying to break down the stigma and I think there has been a shift and of course more work needs to happen but now you have people who are identifying and wanting the help but then the waiting list is about a year long. Or, you can’t access it because of your status. I think its all connected. All the issues have been identified years ago but I think in terms of the climate, the crisis, the mainstream hate and attack on racialized people I think we’re in a different place and time that as a journalist, I’ve never seen. As somebody who does interviews regularly, the feedback has been very violent as well, in the last little bit. So, I have people that are relentless and they call me if my name is on a press release, like they are doing the research and I’m not hard to find but I’ve never been hard to find so if it were to be in the last six months, there’s something that’s happening on a mainstream level that its okay to be racist out loud and attack people and be filmed – its okay. Its okay to attack people who might not have the same views as you and you will find my phone number, email me, go through JaneFinch.com and email them or go through JFAAP, so its on a different level. The entitlement of the upholding of racist views and white supremacy because its white people who are attacking me as well.

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 this?

I think it’s the people who show up everyday, the community residents where everything is falling apart but they still come to Black Creek to sit in that chair with me, for us to work on stuff. You haven’t given up and you have every reason to like, shit is really shitty, and it might be easier to just call it a day and put yourself in a hospital, but you come with your children ready to fight. How can I not fight? I also have a family and if we don’t fight, what are we here for?

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

This community has taught me to laugh at myself because I’m really not that serious, and to have fun. The community has taught me…..it kind of goes to Georgio Mammoliti’s thing where he says something about how they are all strong together – he said something about how the Jane-Finch community is strong but he wants to scatter us cause once you scatter us, we’re weaker so it was interesting in how he said it to me because you know that this community is strong when we’re together. No matter what walk we are whether you’re a gangster or not, for me to do the work I do, I’ve got to look at the bad guy as a good guy. How could the bad guy be a good guy? I talk about policy, I talk about racism, I talk about criminalization – do people wake up wanting to be a bad guy or does bad shit happen and people survive. So, I think I know the bad guys, I know the good guys – I think people just want to survive and be comfortable, healthy…people don’t want to leave Jane-Finch, right? So, the community has taught me to rethink and to try to think things differently. Not to be in someone’s shoes but to really recognize that I might be two paycheques away from sitting in that chair. So, to humble myself and to walk with people and I also came from dirt to get here so it wasn’t a clean path for me and I’m here, so we can all get somewhere.

Any other fond memories?

I live at Tobermory and I’m able to face the Jane-Finch intersection and I’ve been able to have this view for over 23 years. So, there is nothing that could ever replace that, that gives me distance to kind of see things in a different way but its still so grounding because I’m home. Go Jane and Finch!