Sam Tecle

Sam is a passionate, young academic who grew up in the Jane-Finch community. He credits Jane-Finch for becoming who he is – learning from the community and contributing to it. As of 2019, he continues to be deeply connected to the community as an academic, researcher, writer, and activist.

Please start by telling me a bit about yourself.

Well, I grew up in Jane and Finch – from the early ‘90s or ‘89. I was raised here and learned a lot from the community. I’ve become a teacher and a community worker in the community. I’ve become a professional in the community, so I think I’m tied to the community in a lot of different ways. I’m now wrapping up my PhD at York [University], I teach at the University of Toronto and very much try to remain connected and a voice for much of what goes on in the community – very interested in the well-being of Jane and Finch.

I was born in Sudan. We are Eritreans, which is in East Africa beside Ethiopia. I was born on the way to Canada. Our homeland would have been Ethiopia, because it was still not independent yet. That happened in 1993, so we consider ourselves to be Eritrean. Many people might understand it to be Ethiopia because it’s more known, but that’s where “back home” is.

What were your formative experiences growing up and living in the Jane-Finch community?

I remember growing up on the second floor at 15 Tobermory – I think seeing a bunch of different people from different places that I learned, that’s how I learned about multiculturism. That’s how I learned about people from different communities coming together, playing outside together. So those are some of my formative experiences. I remember as well that the building had a community program and I remember back then – the early, early ‘90s – talking about the community stigma and all that, even at that age, as a child. Basically, I was not even eight or nine years’ old, so those were really formative. I mean, in the ‘90s, growing up in Jane and Finch, especially at Tobermory that you come up against – really close to see stuff like people participating in different kinds of economy. You saw drugs, you saw people playing together, you saw that kind of, I guess, poverty or that side of it. All of that stuff was there but then also a deep, deep sense of connectedness in community. I would say all of that was all over the place. Those were some of the formative experiences.

What was it like going to school here?

It was weird because, I think for me, going to school I was a quite ahead of the students and ahead of the grade as my Dad had home-schooled me. We landed first in Vancouver and then to Toronto. When we were in Vancouver, my Dad home-schooled me so when I went to school here, I was quite ahead of the other students and ahead of the grades by age. I remember they put me in gifted stuff – I remember I had to go to school on Saturdays and I didn’t understand that. I remember asking the teacher, “Well, if I’m already ahead of everybody, why do I have to come to school for an extra day?” But I also remember that the teachers always told me that my behaviour was “rambunctious” – I got suspended, moved around, and I went to a lot of different elementary schools, so I went to Firgrove, Topcliff, Yorkwoods. I got kicked out of Yorkwoods and came back to Yorkwoods to graduate.

They always had this narrative – I remember teachers telling me and my parents that “Oh, he’s quite bright but he should get out of the community”. I remember that as well. They always thought that whatever was wrong with me or why I was exhibiting the behaviour that I was, would be rectified if I had gone to a school outside of the community. By grade six, my parents sent me to Willowdale which is a very different school, but they had this gifted program. I was in extended French, so I was learning how to speak French. A lot of that was my behaviour, yes, but also because of the teachers always saying that this place was causing that behaviour or “he is bright and can get out of this area,” so I remember that a lot in school. In connecting with a lot of people who did go to school in the community, they had a very different experience than mine and I’m sure this was in no small part connected to ending up doing a PhD, doing a double major, doing all these things, academically.

What issues were youth facing in the community at that time?

There was a heavy police presence – police were always around. They came up to us a lot and I know now that the things that they did back then were completely illegal, I mean knocking on my door, coming in and asking us questions when I was young and at home taking care of my siblings. I was pretty young, as my parents had shift-work and babysitting was expensive and all that. The police would have their badges and just put them in the peephole on the door, and ‘Shoot, it’s the police!’ and I’d have to let them in. They would question us even though we were underage minors. So, the police were always close by, around, and that is an issue for young people. On top of that, we were looking for programs and for things to do. We were quite energetic and had a lot of free time and very little structure, perhaps, or programming, so we were around doing a lot – I remember doing that. A lot more structure or community programs would have been very helpful for the young people from when we were young.

Schooling experiences weren’t the greatest. Schools didn’t really want to keep us in school too long. I mean, I know a lot of peers from my generation didn’t have the best of experiences in school and they actually stopped going, or got kicked out. It was clear that the school didn’t want them, so by 14 or 15 they were off doing other things and that could be anything. It could be positive or productive, or maybe not so. I think of those as being the issues that we saw around the community.

What were the influences or what prompted you to go on to post-secondary education?

Like I said, I had gone to a school outside of the community. I went to an Extended French high school, so academic achievement for me was never a choice, with my parents. My dad was a teacher, or is still a teacher to me, back home, so he said that scholastic achievement was a no-choice option. I did that probably to play sports and to do other kinds of activities, so I took care of my grades and I think also understanding what type of career options might be possible, like what I was going to do for work. I saw that university was going to be part of the plan, it was something that I had a choice in rather than menial work or shift work. A lot of the guys – we tried out UPS a bit and that’s hard, hard work. Like knowing that, I don’t know if I’d want to do this and that was a lot of the motivation. I worked a lot of part time jobs – security guard at the hospital at [Hwy] 400 and Finch. Those are long over-night shifts and I didn’t know if I wanted to do that long term, so those influences were important for me. I wanted more of a say in doing what I wanted to do.

You’ve done some research with youth in the community. Tell me about the research and about some of the findings.

The first one, I guess I could say, was my supervisor, Carl James (York professor), had written a book called, Life at the Intersection. I have an essay in there about my experiences growing up in Finch and how stigma and expectations can cloud our experiences as young people, as I described in school, so I was a research assistant on that book. I supported Carl in that book, did some of the research.

Jane and Finch is quite more diverse than people would think. I think that’s an important thing for people to remember. I believe that some of the research showed that it’s structurally neglected – it very rarely is in the centre of the municipal agenda or the provincial agenda. I think some of the housing that that was built at the turn of the 1960s and the ‘70s is really breaking down, so a lot of these things we see as issues. They affect young people’s experiences, they affect families’ experiences, and also what the teachers told me, ‘Oh you need to get out, you need to make it out’ – like escape. It really was a narrative of escape. It’s really weird to tell a bunch of children whose parents literally escaped places, like mine did, for war, persecution, or oppression and to say, like you’ve landed in a place where you now need to escape. It’s very interesting!

And then contrary to that, lots of people in Finch are generational – they don’t leave. There’s a lot of love here, a lot of community, a lot of connectedness, and there’s a lot of awareness. They’re intimately aware of things like this. I work with Success Beyond Limits, which is a community organization for youth [at Westview Centennial Secondary School] and we do a summer program at York [University] and we have a parent night where upwards of 80-90 parents come, which is a lot more than the high schools get. We bus them in, making it very possible for them to come. I run the part where it’s about the community workshop. They’ve all heard my spiel because they have multiple kids in the program, and they come and they always say that it’s a choice that they stay. I think it’s important that community members are aware of the stigma and aware of the actual neglect that produces our experiences, but they choose to stay and they also choose to work through what might be an improvement or making it better to ensure we get the resources we need. I think that’s powerful, actually.

Another part that I think we’re really excited about, or hopeful about, is working on a community research ethics project. There is an understanding that York University and other researchers have a particular kind of relationship with Jane and Finch community members, Jane and Finch residents, whereby they are the fodder for research. So, a lot of times, researchers and academics will come into Finch, talk to people and be condescending, rude or unethical and that kind of thing. Also, there are nursing students, teacher candidates – all these kinds of placement programs – that send undergraduate students who are not prepared to deal with what they might encounter here, which ends up being negative experiences for all involved. We saw all this to be very historical and a generational thing, so a lot of community residents organized together, produced a conference, produced a report and thinking about how to reframe ethics and ethical relationships between York University and all other researchers in the Jane and Finch community. That is an important thing that I was involved with that and I’m really hoping it gets pushed through in a formal kind of way. It’s probably been an eight-year process; that’s how long it takes with community. That’s some of the research that I’ve been involved with, as well.

Also, some of the stuff around how young people are experiencing schooling in both the elementary and high schools in the area. Through my research, that is ongoing right now. Actually, though there are funds allocated to supporting these communities that are low-income or the economic base is not as great, they are still under resourced. The schools are under resourced, the schools have less programs offerings, they have fewer elective courses, and also that the students’ experiences seem to be much more punitive. They are suspended or expelled at a much higher rate compared to the rest of the system. These are the realities since the ‘70s. It’s interesting in that some of the parents that we meet at the summer program say that that is how it was when they were in school – when they were at Westview in the early 1980s, or even before. So that’s disheartening, but it’s also important that we track this so that we can put it to the attention of the people who can change it.

Please tell me about your perspective with regards to politics in this community.

I think, electorally, the community has a particular kind of history. I think there is a wide difference between who actually might vote and who we might consider to be the communities with whom we work. I think there’s a perspective, a dominant perspective, that the only way to participate in the political process is to vote. I think politicians really work towards getting people to vote them in. But what I’ve come to recognize in this community, my community, is that there is a political power that is beyond checking a box or ballot one day every four years. I think that needs to be said. I think there’s a particular kind of voting base that’s historical and that needs to be said and identified, I think. But also, I think, provincially, we saw that this area went NDP – for the first time probably in quite a while. I think we must identify that. Name recognition is huge when we think who actually gets to be the political representatives, but whoever ends up being in those seats, whether it’s a councillor or trustee, MPP or MP, is that community members hold them to account – hold their feet to the fire, whether it’s through letter writing campaigns, direct action – in all kinds of ways.

One example would be the Toronto Strong Neighbourhood Strategy where they identified a certain number of wards in the city – that used to be called priority neighbourhoods or neighbourhood improvement areas – that was going to be part of a focus of the city, which includes resources and all these things to improve neighbourhoods by 2020. I’m not sure, but I think Jane and Finch was not on the original list, but then through communication or organizing and advocacy, it eventually became a fact that this neighbourhood should be included in this focus. And when there were some schools slated to be closed, there were community members who organized, agitated, and advocated and the schools didn’t close. So, there’s political power and there’s political representatives who end up in office, that we continually must hold to account to speak on our behalf, and I think all of that, to me, makes up complicated politics.

Of course, there’s resources and community organizations and resident groups. There are some tables where people get to sit at and speak at and that is the nature of democracy. I think it’s supposed to be messy. I’ve never gone to a town hall where it was all polite and everybody was exactly 30 seconds on the mic, nor should it be. That’s me – I love those messy town-hall community moments where the needs and the truths of people’s experiences erupts and it kind of undoes the structure of deputations.

What do you think about the role of governments and institutions in making Jane-Finch the way it is today?

I think, unequivocally, it’s the fact of that neglect that I talked about – actual ongoing neglect. A community like Finch, or any other community that is made up in a similar way, it’s not made by happenstance or by luck or by fluke or by great chance. I think that if you put up high-density housing, public housing or affordable housing and then don’t maintain it or don’t take care of it, you throw a bunch of people together who are existing in a city where there are barriers for racialized people getting work. There’s barriers for people getting assistance and they’re constantly pulling back from what social assistance is provided. I think when you do that in an area, and that only happens because, I think, elected officials and politicians know, and this is their perception that I’ve heard from politicians off the record, that “those people” don’t vote. According to their minds and the way they do their calculus, they could do anything they want to them, or you don’t need to invest in them, so then you’ll invest somewhere else.

I work downtown so I see cranes everywhere. I see development. I see everything and I think, well, there’s a patch of land here that I’ve been driving by or taking a bus by or walking along Finch and there’s nobody running to invest or build on these spaces. You need government for that – you need government to let people know that this area or that area needs investment. We’ve been ignoring it for too long, neglected this place, and the resources are just going to have to go here. You have to get people and just bring them along. That’s leadership and that’s not what our officials are doing. Therefore, you’ll continue to get housing like I’ve lived in at Tobermory in the ‘90s, that’s falling apart – hot water is out three times a week, that the cupboard doors are falling off. I’d wake up without an alarm clock, the cupboard would fall on my bed in my room. That’s the reality of housing and then you can imagine, what are the schools like. You take a hospital, an active hospital, out of the community. I think of that and I think about how it’s directly related to the decisions governments are making at all levels.

You’ve talked about of the some issues but are there any other prominent or primary issues in terms of what community residents are facing?

I’ve worked with young people who find it extremely difficult to find part-time work. And, we’ve been hearing that for at least ten years. Many of the businesses or small businesses in the area have memorized all the postal codes in the area and they just don’t take resumes from young people in the community. To the point where our young people, who caught onto this game, put different addresses on their resumes. This is literally a fact of survival. I think there’s that.

I think, just generally city-wide, but in our community as well, something like public transportation should be free. A lot of people who are low-income are trying to find work and they are not in that category where they’ve given up, find it very difficult to get to jobs, or search and assistance programs, or those employment programs, or to get to interviews. I also think perhaps some of the day-to-day costs people are facing, especially like young mothers, families that have just one person working is just tough to make it through each day. This is connected to larger issues like a living wage, and if you are trying to help young people find housing, it’s incredibly difficult. All of these things just pile on to what people are facing and that’s all of those things people face in Jane and Finch and in other communities with a similar make up. Literally, those are everyday things that are very difficult.

I assume that social justice, equity, and racism are important concerns for you, but it doesn’t seem like things have changed much over the years. As a resident and/or an academic, how do you deal with that?

I was just telling this story the other day. Eggerton Ryerson was the first superintendent of the Upper Canada education system before Ontario changed it. There were Black families who had sent their kids to the schools, but their schools were a one-room school house, with less resources, and the white families would send their kids to schools that were very well resourced. Sounds very familiar, by the way. But, the Black families organized and got him to change the law. He changed the law where he said schools must be integrated. So, in the communities where the Black families were close to a now desegregated white schoolhouse, or as the law said, ‘formally desegregated’, the white families moved with their kids – basically self segregated and created their own white-only neighbourhood.

Then Eggerton Ryerson said, and these words are seared in my mind, he said “I’ve changed the law, but the peoples’ will is stronger than the law.” Part of what academics work on is to try to convince people beyond us changing laws or forcing change down people’s throats, is saying how historically unjust our society is currently arranged. It’s to try to literally, and probably anybody who is interested in equity from whatever field they work in, at some point you’re going to have to change hearts and minds somehow. How do we make the case for the fact that these injustices are not people’s lack of desire to be contributing members of society, or they just don’t want to work, or they’re lazy, or all these kinds of neo-liberal pull up your boots stuff excuses? That historically the fact is that a bunch of these people come up or start up in these communities, where they don’t have a lot, end up having a very difficult life, much more difficult than people who are born at say Leslie and Finch or Forest Hill. They had a different starting point. I think part of being an academic is understanding or trying to find out new and different and exciting and convincing ways that our world, as it’s currently arranged, or our society, or our community in Jane and Finch, needs some redress.

There is some reconciliation that needs to happen historically and then perhaps we may all be able to start better and perhaps we may not need to organize life this way. Perhaps even not under capitalism, but that’s a longer struggle. I think part of that work was what Ryerson was saying at that moment – we can change laws, we can do things, but what happens if people just check out? This is how some of these communities get made, as white flight is an actual historical phenomenon whereby people leave an area and it gets to be known as racialized or as poor. There’s histories and movements on that and I think that’s part of the work of the academic, to let that truth speak so that we might end up somewhere else. We might do something else.

What have you learned from the community?

I think one of the most important things, and I’ve heard like world-class academics say, is that the only time they got into trouble is when they stopped listening to their people. I think that Finch or the community of people from Jane and Finch, no matter how far or wherever the heck I go, it’s always remembering that these people – we tell it how it is, we tell it raw, we tell it straight. And, they are never wrong, when I listen to the community or to my community. I just find that I’m always clear about what I’m supposed to be doing, like what my mission is. I think that on my birthday – on the 14^th in 2003, it was the year with the big power outage – I remember I was in a summer school course on the philosophy of religion when the power on the whole eastern seaboard went out – the blackout across New York, Toronto – all over.

I remember thinking, “Well I guess class is cancelled.” York was dark and it was just in the middle of the day, in the afternoon. The professor didn’t show up and some of us students where there and I had just walked to school from Jane and Finch – I walked to class and there were three of us, so guessing class was cancelled I thought let me just walk home. I walked back towards the community and I saw all along Jane Street there were bonfires set up, there were barbeques, people were playing music from their car, and I said, “Wow!” If we were to believe the stigma and the stories of what all other people say about our community, there should be chaos. Technically, there should be chaos, but people were literally having a party. I realized that if the revolution ever comes, I’ll be in Jane and Finch and we’re going to be just fine, because we’ll take care of each other.

I had the same thought when it was the G-20 protests. It was mayhem downtown – people were killing each other, police were blocking their badges and there was martial law. We were in Jane and Finch watching, and like listen, bet you guys wish you were here now. Right? In this “violent” part of the city. It was crazy down there! I always think about those two things, that when it comes to it and we don’t know what was going on during the outage, people were just like, listen, if the meats going to go bad, I’m going to share it with my neighbours and we’ll play some music. I didn’t even know that all these people who live in this part of the city knew how to start a fire – I didn’t know how to start a fire! I ate, I danced, and I partied with my neighbours who I didn’t know on a first name basis. So I think of that always as a fact that there’s always ways in which this community will always take care of each other even if we don’t know what’s going on in the world.

What are you most proud of with regard to Jane-Finch?

I am really very proud to have grown up in and to live and be connected to Jane and Finch, but I’m nervous too. I wrote in Life at the Intersection, when you tell people that you’re from Jane and Finch, and that you’re doing a PhD, got a fellowship at Harvard, you’re doing all these great things – got a job at University of Toronto as a professor – and they always think, look you made it out. It’s really great, you’re from Jane and Finch, and despite that; rather than it was because of the fact that it was being from Jane and Finch that constituted me and helped me in my formation. So because of that I am now more nervous and hesitant to do that to tell people I’m from Janea and Finch, because of how strong people’s stigma is about my community. But to be clear, I am quite proud of being from Jane and Finch. I will always want to know more about the history, I will always want to think about how we might hold the city to account. And the province. Whenever we view what is happening in the city, this province, or this country, from the lens of growing up in Jane and Finch, there’s always so much more we need to be doing and for that lens I am immensely grateful of having been raised and growing up in Jane and Finch for that.

Any other comments?

Growing up in Jane and Finch made me love public services and public spaces. It’s no mistake that I’m a writer now and I grew up across the street from the library. The apartment that I had was extremely hot in the summer, so we used to go to the closest place that had air conditioning and that was the library and I was unlocked into many different worlds. The library is now under renovation, closed for two years. There was a threat during the Ford era of libraries getting cut or shrinking in size, but I think that places – especially like Jane and Finch – need public spaces and these can be spaces of great imagination and thinking. So, I’m very thankful that I grew up across the street from a library that was in the middle of Jane and Finch.