Talisha is the Community Projects Coordinator for York University’s TD Community Engagement Centre, located in the Jane-Finch community. Having gone to school in the local area, she credits the ACE program and the community for providing her with great knowledge and experiences that enables her to do her job in the Jane-Finch community. She is passionate about the potential for youth in the community and the possibilities for an improved community.
Please start by telling me a bit about yourself.
I grew up in a mix of Weston and Finch and Jane and Sheppard so up until I was 11, I lived at Weston and Finch with my grandmother. My grandmother, grandfather, mom, dad, two of my aunts and cousin all lived together. Traditionally for immigrants, this was the way to do it. My Dad came to Canada with his parents and their whole family so that was kind of the way of living when you first came to Canada. My family is from Guyana and I was born in Guyana and migrated when I was two. My dad and my grandparents came first, and they were living here. So, my dad came before I was born, and he was living here while I was born. Two years later, he sponsored my mom and myself and then we came over as well.
We lived at Weston and Finch in a house with my grandmother, grandfather my two aunts, cousins and my mom and my dad. I went to Daystrom Public school for elementary school and then I went to Humber Summit and when I was at Humber Summit, my parents moved out on their own and we moved to Jane and Sheppard into one of the buildings over there and from there, I went to Emery Collegiate Institute for high school. I did the ACE program at Emery.
The ACE program, called the Advanced Credit Experience, was a program that was offered in a few of the high schools - Emery, Westview, Jeffery’s and McGuigan and it was where, while you were in grade eleven, they took you out of high school for a full semester and you were at York University. You were taking a single course at York University, a three-credit course, doing a co-op at York and then having a sociology class that I was taking on campus. So, I took part in that program and I had no idea that York University was so close to us. I don’t think I ever stepped foot on the campus – I didn’t ever step foot on the campus prior to that.
When I learned about the university – I remember my cohort, we were always on campus. We spent every minute on campus just because of how much nicer it was than our high school. We did everything there. We weren’t at the high school for the whole semester. That was a real eye opener experience and a really cool experience. I don’t think I was on path – for sure I was not on path to going to university because I was taking all applied classes prior to that. My average was around C prior to the ACE program so that kind of changed things a lot for me because I mean, in my mind, I really enjoyed the ACE program and I had a really great time. I liked the class that I was taking and in my mind - like I got a C in the ACE program but I was like, I was 16 and if I can get a C and when I’m 18, two years from now and actually in a university, I’ll be able to do this, no problem. It really helped to boost my morale but then putting me in that environment made a really big change for me. It was really cool to play that role and now coming full circle as somebody who works at York University doing some of those bridging programs, it’s kind of a cool experience.
While you were growing up, what were your impressions of the Jane-Finch community?
Interesting because I found that I didn’t really – until maybe I was in high school, that I didn’t realize what this concept of Jane and Finch was. It was just the community we lived in. I didn’t realize that there was this idea of what Jane-Finch was for a really long time and that’s probably because I was young and lived in my own bubble. One of the things I remember quite vividly was when I was young and the whole family would go to the Jane-Finch Mall on Sunday. It was a routine. Every Sunday we’d go to the Jane-Finch Mall. I think Jane-Finch Mall used to have a flea market on Sundays, but I don’t know if it is as lively as it was back when we used to go.
Every Sunday, we would all load up to go. My aunt had this big cube brown van and we would all get into it and drive to the Jane-Finch Mall and it was a really neat experience. I remember just everybody knowing everyone in the mall at that point. There was a lot of Indo-Caribbean people I think that were coming in at around that time, so it was kind of like meeting your old village back in the mall. It was just really a cool experience. You went to the mall, you saw everyone and then when there were rides, because occasionally, they had rides at the Jane-Finch Mall, sometimes there was a carnival at the mall. That was one of the things that I remember a lot when I was younger – going to the carnival.
One of the things I knew about the community was that it was a community that allowed you to be authentic to your culture. We would go to the Caribbean store in the mall, used to be called Jafta – now called something else, we would go there quite regularly to get all of our food. We would go there, and you would get authentic fruits from Guyana, you would get the meats that you would get in Guyana and the fish – all of those kinds of things. It allowed us to still be Guyanese in a different country. Those were some of the experiences I remember. I think it was in high school that I became more aware of this idea or concept of what Jane-Finch was. I think its because that’s when I started having more interaction with people from outside of the community. For example, my cousins would come down.
I remember this one story when my cousin came down from Brampton and he put it in his BBM status that he was in Jane and Finch and it was like we were going to the library, like we’re walking our little cousin to the library – why is this something? And then I started to become more aware of the stigma attached to Jane and Finch and how people from outside it might seem cool to go to Jane and Finch but for a lot of other people from outside this community that its heavily stigmatized and criminalized. So, I think I was in high school when I became more aware of the stigma that is attached to this community.
What challenges do you think youth were facing at that time?
I think one of the big things I saw amongst my peers was an affect of that – the stigma that’s attached to the community. Even for myself, I was a C student, that’s what I was. I just didn’t have a lot of motivation when I was younger to do better. I was in high school from 2006 to 2010 and a lot of my friends were the same way at that time. Just the idea that nobody is kind of asking you to do better. Nobody pulls you inside and expects you to do better. If you are a C student, well you’re from Jane and Finch – you’re a C student, just try to graduate. I think that was the perception of a lot of young people who, now thinking back on it, they were so smart, they just didn’t get that person to say to just focus on yourself or they didn’t have somebody to expect them to do better so they ended up either dropping out or just finishing up high school when they had so much potential to do a lot more.
I think that was one of the big things our generation was facing – that idea that people from this community were not expected to do well. If you were doing well, if you were an A student, you were pushed into university 100% but if you weren’t, if you were somebody who was kind of struggling, the expectation wasn’t high for you. It was just to continue doing what you were doing and hopefully graduate. That’s something that I saw a lot of when I was growing up. I think that’s what got me passionate about doing the work that I was doing because I thought so many people that could have done so much better and just didn’t have that opportunity because of the expectations associated with themselves. I think that was something that a lot of young people were facing. I think at that time there was this weird shift between the push to university – like for a really long time, there was a big push for university and there was a really big shift at that time where the trades were starting to be pushed at you. It was kind of like a weird shift that led to a lack of resources, I would say. I feel that Emery too, that school in itself, was in a weird position in that a lot of people thought that Emery was not part of the community, so I don’t know if they necessarily have as much programming as other schools had. I don’t know what the stats are, but I think the big issue that I was seeing was the lack of expectation and the stigma that was attached to a lot of the young people.
What prompted you to pursue a university degree at York?
The ACE program prompted me to pursue a university degree - just being in that environment and seeing what my potential was. One of the big things I remember thinking about when I started the ACE program was how much nicer the campus was compared to our schools and thinking to myself – this is somewhere I would like to be as opposed to somewhere I’m being forced to be in. If you look at the schools back at that time and I remember at one point the ceiling was leaking by my locker, it had a big brown stain on it, and it leaked, and everybody knew to avoid it. The library had three working computers in the front. It was just not the best conditions.
When you go from a space that looks like that to York University where everything, at that point, looked gorgeous, it just changed for me. It was somewhere that I wanted to be and where I was spending my time even out of class when I was in the ACE program. We were on campus 24/7. So, I was spending my time out of class and that definitely changed my perspective and just knowing that I could do it because I did do it. I took a class and I passed it. Knowing that I could do that made a lot of difference for me. So that’s when it clicked that I was going to university.
When I came back from the ACE program and was in grade 12, all of my teachers would tell you that it was a complete switch. I became an A student and on the honour roll from then on. I got a lot of scholarships, but it was just grade 11 and 12 where that shift happened. If you looked at my grade 9 and 10 report cards, it would be very different.
How did you get involved with Act for Youth? Tell me about some of your experiences in that project and how participating in this project influenced you?
I got involved in Act for Youth when I was in my first year of university and it was interesting because it was the ACE coordinator, Jackie Robinson, who had sent me the link for the Act for Youth project. I applied because I thought it looked interesting and it was a paid position. It was a $500 honorarium which at that time was a lot. So, I got involved in the program.
I think my first experience with research was with the Act for Youth project. I was actually in English, thinking I would become an English teacher prior to Act for Youth, and so I had never heard of research. I remember the first couple of sessions when they were on qualitative research and quantitative research and my brain was just…what is this, why am I sitting through this? I was just thinking about the $500 cheque at the end. So, yes, the first couple of sessions was all about teaching us about this. It was the Community Based Research Institute that was teaching us all about ethics and at 18, trying to learn about qualitative quantitative ethics. It was just going right through my head but the last part of it was when we actually got to do it.
They had already done the research when I was part of Act for Youth so they had all the findings but then they had us analyse them so that’s when I really started to get interested in it because they gave us statistics. For example, they had sections on stereotypes which was already something that was interesting to me. They had a section on safety and the research was done on people who were in the high schools – young people in the high schools. They had stereotypes, they had safety, they had well-being, they had physical space and they allowed us to work in groups to analyse those research results. That’s when I really got interested because I was looking at the results and also taking into consideration the things that I knew from my lived experiences.
There was one part around safety and I can’t remember exactly but it was that certain pockets in the community felt safer than others and then I was like, would it be gender based because as a woman, as a female, I don’t necessarily have the same safety concerns that I know the guys do because the guys would get jumped or the guys might get robbed but that wasn’t something that I worried about when I was walking home. So, I was taking my lived experience and using that to help me analyse that research and that’s when I got really interested in research. I think one of the big things that came out of the Act for Youth project was that I now had a theory to something that I knew. So, I talked about how people in high school knew there was this thing attached to this community, but I didn’t realize that it was actually something that somebody was studying.
When I started listening to those recordings about people talking about the stereotypes in the community and when I started to look at the questionnaires and surveys and people were talking about stereotypes, it really helped me name that as something. I don’t think, prior to that that I was ever referring to the stereotypes of Jane and Finch. So, it helped me name that theory. It also got me really involved in research and also helped me look at the critical parts of research. So now, watching the news and saying, “Well that happened at Jane and Sheppard – why are they saying Jane and Finch?” So, I really started to get critical of the media and the way research was done in our community.
The other really cool thing I got from that project was that we got to create something so I got to create this video clip where I recorded a couple of my friends saying some of the findings and then put together this video clip which was a cool experience but I was also playing it for a lot of my friends. It was a really cool way to take some of that research and show it to other young people in the community who were also having the same thoughts as I was. We knew that people thought badly about Jane and Finch, but we didn’t realize how that affected those stereotypes and how that affected people’s sense of well-being in those places. That’s one of the things that I took away from the Act for Youth Project.
From your perspective, what issues are youth/residents facing today and what are the challenges in supporting residents deal with those issues?
That is a huge question! I think there is a lot going on in our community right now. One of the things that still exists is the stereotype of this community. The stereotype still exists even though the media has changed a little bit. Somethings have changed a little bit. On campus I see it. Students on campus still see Jane-Finch in a very specific way and that has affects because those students grow up to be teachers or police officers or just anything – no matter what they grow up to be, they grow up to be something.
One of the other things I see in our community right now is the upcoming changes that are happening in our community. We know that with the subway things change. One of the big housing complexes, Firgrove, closed down two years ago and residents were relocated. Then also if you drive up Jane Street, you’ll see some things that are different. You go by Exbury and you’ll see luxury townhouses coming and that starts at $800,000. Chalkfarm, the first building got gutted and they redid it. Its now smaller rentals units. They took one unit and split it into two and now rented for the same price. Downsview Park is a whole thing on its own. Across from Downsview Park, there’s the Masonic building and that’s going to be a condo. There’s a lot of changes coming into our community in that respect. Even if we look toward Yorkdale which is pretty close to us, there’s a lot of condo’s that have come up around there. So, all that’s happening. t have direct influences with our community. So, as long as that stigma exists, that’s always going to be the challenge.
One of the things that we want to be careful about is preserving the essence of Jane and Finch because Jane and Finch has always been this community that has rich cultural aspects of it. Its always been the community that no matter where you come from, you can always get food, your cultural food. Its always been that community where activism exists. It’s the community where you see seniors at 10:00 pm on a Sunday, sitting on a bench and chatting or whatever it is. How do we make sure that exists and that we’re not actually kicking our community members out to make space for the luxury condo’s or luxury townhouses or whatever they are? That’s something that I’m really concerned about and then with those changes, how do we make sure its still affordable for resident’s who have lived here for twenty years and that rents not going up or property rates aren’t going up where people can no longer afford to live here when they’ve lived here their entire lives. That’s something that I see happening and something I’m concerned about.
One of the other things that I see happening is the changes to education. Our schools are already underfunded. Our young people already have so many barriers to face but now you are being put in class sizes where their classes are 40 students or you put them in class sizes where you no longer have support for students with special needs or students who need special care so that’s something that worries me. There are so many issues young people are already facing that adding more cuts to their plate can only further hinder them. Poverty is always something in our community and it’s the underlying issue that I think leads to a lot of the issues that our people face in this community. Just being able to afford your cost of living and those kinds of things, I mean poverty has existed for a very long time in this community.
One of the really cool things about Jane and Finch is that its so diverse, so multi-cultural but Jane-Finch also has this really interesting community support system that exists and its organic. So, one of things you see is that whenever – and to this day, I see it – when one of our new families come from Guyana, the existing community supports them. When my maternal grandparents came after I did – they came when I was about twelve, there were people who were there to help my Nana find a job – making sure he had access to a job. There were people that were driving him to work or helping him take the TTC to work. So, there’s those types of community networks that exists in this community that I don’t know if you would get this if you moved to say Richmond Hill or Brampton – those types of support systems, you wouldn’t get. Being able to find a job as a new immigrant and then also having people willing to drive you to work or help you take the TTC is a huge thing. And its all other immigrants who came here three or four years ago helping you do those things. Being able to go to the store and find a fish that you used to get in South America – that’s a huge deal and creates a really big sense of belonging that you wouldn’t get otherwise.
Even if you just drive into the streets in Jane-Finch, you’ll see the little flags that people have in front of their house – little colourful flags and that’s something that Indo-Caribbean families put in front of their house. Seeing that in a new country really helps to create a sense of belonging from my family and I know from a lot of other communities as well. That kind of social community safety net exists in Jane and Finch that you wouldn’t get in other communities is one of its biggest strengths.
When I started my Masters, I remember five women coming up to me and asking what I needed to succeed in getting my Masters – those types of things. Even other people who are doing their PHD or Masters who are like “Okay Talisha, you’re studying this process, we’re going to set these days for study dates so that we can work together”, even though they didn’t go to York but to the University of Toronto but it’s making those kinds of efforts to make sure that I succeed. I think that’s one of the great things about Jane and Finch. Its always been a community that supports community members to make sure that they succeed and thrive. That’s one of my favourite things about the community.
One of the other aspects that I think is one of the strongest points is the activism in the community. Just yesterday, there was a rally in front of the building that was burned down and you had people there who weren’t from the community but were rallying the community. You had people playing music who are local musicians and you had different community members coming out to support thee residents who lived in that building and to make sure they were being treated with respect and that the property owner was being held accountable. The Food Justice March is another – there is so much activism in this community that doesn’t get talked about enough but one of the biggest assets of the community.
One of the things that makes me really happy is spending a lot of time in the high schools now and one of the things I’ve been seeing is that young people are a lot more engaged and critical than I was when I was in high school. I didn’t start thinking about these things until university but all of our placement students that we’ve had from the ACE program and all of the young people I see in the high schools, when I’m going in to do scholarships clinics or workshops on what to expect in post secondary, they are all so politically aware and politically engaged. It is incredible.
I’m so excited for those young people because they just know so much which is why a couple months ago there was a student walk out. All of our high schools walked out – every single one of them walked out with posters and were on the main corners about the education cuts. I don’t think that kind of stuff was happening in our high schools back in the day. I met this young woman who literally put poster notes on every single locker in Westview to remind her peers that the walkout was happening. That type of organizing, that type of political awareness - I think that our young people are now activists in this community. That is one of our strengths right now and I think in the future, I’m really excited for them to vote and for them to continue to make the changes that they are making.
Social Justice, equity, racism are important issues for you, but it doesn’t seem like things have changed enough to make a difference for the people who face those barriers. As a worker in the area, how do you deal with that?
I think one of the things I do is to make sure that I’m staying motivated and making combatting burned out. We all get burned out, but I try to minimize the amount of time that I get burned out by focusing on the small things.
But, in terms of creating the change - I think we have created a lot of change. Maybe that's just my perspective because I get to work with young people, so I get to see the young people who are so politically ware, for me, that's change. Young people are watching video's about Jane and Finch, about the stereotypes of jane and Finch in their local high schools and they are writing essays about it. So I think there is change and maybe that's why I stay motivated because I get to work with those young people who prove to me everyday that change has happened and that they are making changes and continuing to make changes in their community. That's something that makes me happy.
In terms of the fight against racism, I think we manage to change in the sense that young people are talking about that very early as opposed to kind of learning about it in university or college or after high school and kind of focusing on it. Now we have a lot of teachers in our high schools that are from the community which is a really cool thing because they are now teaching – like Mr. Smith or Dwayne. There are just a lot of people who are from the community who are now coming back to the community as teachers or as social workers. That creates a unique perspective but that’s a change as well because when I was growing up, none of the teachers were from the area. That’s a change for me and its never enough – we definitely need a lot more work to create a society that truly doesn’t have racism and poverty but with those little things we have managed to create change. Even the way media talks about Jane and Finch has changed a lot since I was younger. Like I say, that’s change, change that has happened. I’ve never thought about it in that manner, I just think of the things we have managed to change.
What are you most proud of?
I got a master’s degree in Sociology which is kind of a big deal because I’m the first one in my family to finish my under-grad. Continuing and doing my masters was a huge accomplishment. But I’m not sure that’s what I’m most proud of. I think right now, at this time, I’m really proud of a program that I started with a couple of my colleagues called Lotus which is a program that creates space for Indo-Caribbean women in the community. That’s something I’m really proud of because for a really long time the narrative around Indo-Caribbean women was that they are very docile and don’t want to engage in activism but in Jane and Finch, that’s completely the opposite of what the experience is. Also, even though Jane-Finch has a really big population of Indo-Caribbean women there was never a space that was dedicate to this population. Creating a program that creates that space has definitely been the highlight of my year. The program is for women of all ages and held at the Black Creek Community Farm.
What has the community taught you?
Oh, my goodness, the community has taught me everything I know, I think. I don’t think I can nail that down. Everything that I know, it comes from the community. All of the work that I do was grounded in knowledge that comes from the community. Even the work I do around creating more access to secondary education is based on community saying that our young people are not accessing post secondary or the work I’m doing with the Jane-Finch Community Research Project, again its based on those knowledge and histories saying research isn’t being done right or this is how research should be done. Everything that I know and all the work that I do is influenced by different things I’ve learned in the community.