Celebrating Black History Month – RPNA Monthly Community Meeting

By -

Presenter Joy Henderson, stresses the importance of Allyship as practice to counter the inequities brought on by privilege and power.


The Regent Park Neighbourhood Association (RPNA) was formed in early 2015 by an equal parts small group of both Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) resident & Market resident living in Regent Park. The Association looks to represent the interests of all resident of Regent Park by providing a broad range of advocacy services, as well as building community through events and meetings.

Mission: “The RPNA seeks to create a safe space where where resident voices are amplified on issues that are important to our neighbourhood & take action.” - RPNA

In the first of a series of monthly meetings, the RPNA hosted a virtual community meeting to celebrate Black History month. The featured guest was Joy Henderson, a former Regent Park resident, and Afro-Lakota Child and Youth Care Practitioner/Professor, and writer.

Joy Henderson's has deep roots in Regent Park that stretch back to her childhood, her mother who still lives in the area. As a young person, in the 90’s, Joy became involved in a community based project called Catch da Flava - a youth newsletter publication produced by Focus Media Arts Centre (formerly known as the Regent Park Focus Youth Media Arts Centre). The publication still continues today http://catchdaflava.blogspot.com/. And so, from these early engagements with the world at large, Joy has built a career that incorporates both her Black and Indigenous backgrounds to address the social inequities faced by racialized communities.

Joy Henderson's presentation to RPNA's community meeting, centers on the importance and practice of “allyship”, a term that defines the act of allyship as “when a person of privilege works in solidarity and partnership with a marginalized group of people to help take down the systems that challenge that group's basic rights, equal access, and ability to thrive in our society." (https://www.edi.

gov/blog/communities/what-allyship). Allyship, seeks to minimize power differentials and enhance the diversity of inclusion.

Allyship, counters such structural and systemic power imbalances as: “in Canada and western states, we are governed by a Christian-Judeo, cis, white, male hetero, abled framework and that has determined our laws, beliefs, social practices and educational practices, work schedules, what we consider manners, our media, what we eat, how we eat, what is professional, what we consider lazy, how we dress.”

For Black people in Canada this means that for example, Black children are more likely to be suspended, put in behavioural programs, arrested for acting out, and more likely to be streamed into applied learning streams.

Promoting Allyship with the celebration of Black History month serves to highlight the need for collaboration across privilege and power.


Intro Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhNZfs8ezZ

www.bensound.com/4800

End Credits: https://freesound.org/s/45808/


Written by
Dimitrije Martinovic

Journalist
FOCUS Media Arts Centre



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Regent Park Portrayed in Film and Television

By -
Image
Toronto has a rich history of being a go-to shooting location for many television and film production companies. Some notable films shot here over the years include Good Will Hunting (1997), Billy Madison (1998), American Psycho (2000), and X-Men (2000). Regent Park has also had its share of showcases in film. This article aims to review the general content of movie dramas and televisions shows shot in Regent and explore their relationship to the community. Clement Virgo is a director, producer, and writer from Montego Bay, Jamaica. He was born in 1966 and moved to the Regent Park area in Toronto in 1977. During this time Regent Park was generally populated by low-income families and as a hot spot for drugs. Virgo is most recently known for his roles in Greenleaf (2016-2018), The Book of Negroes (2015), and The Wire (2002) as Director and/or Producer. His first feature-length film, however, was Rude (1995), which was filmed almost entirely in the old Regent Park. “The film told...
Read more

What Social Inclusion Means to Me

By -
I had moved into Regent Park only a few days before I saw the pink, fuchsia, strawberry, indigo, yellow, green, neck streamers and sparkling robes worn by children, parents, aunts, uncles, and elders as they marched passed my kitchen door. Soon, the nearby Athletic Grounds was blazing with colour. Although it was the first time I heard them, the intonations on the microphone were recognizable, even to me, as prayers. It was Eid, the concluding celebration after Ramadan. It was a beautiful sight. I am a White Jewish senior and I hunted for a stairless condo for years before I chose to live in Regent Park and then only because a relative did business with the new seniors’ building there. “Regent Park?” a friend exclaimed. “You are going to have ethnic problems.”  “Not I.  I come from a long line of fiery leftie activists.” I replied. Stage four and five of revitalizing this post-war subsidized development into a multi-income community was just beginning and I ju...
Read more

Meet Your Neighbourhood Police Officers – PC Mircea Biga and PC Farzad Ghotbi

By -
Image
Community-based policing is a proactive law enforcement strategy that focuses on building ties and working closely with a community’s members to create partnerships and plans for preventing and reducing crime. While community policing will look differently depending on the community it serves, a central feature is that the same officer patrols and works in the same area on a permanent basis. Currently there are 17 community-based police programs in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), but what most people don’t know is that Toronto’s community policing started in Regent Park in May of 2017. We know this because the original officers involved in setting up the Regent Park community policing program continue to work here today. The officers are PC Mircea Biga, PC Farzad Ghotbi, and PC Edward Parks; the newest officer assigned to the Regent Park community is PC Nigel Thomas (who is replacing PC Melissa Huntley while she is on maternity leave). Symptomatic of the increasing diversity...
Read more