ACTIVIST resources
Prisoner Correspondance Project - The Prisoner Correspondence Project started in 2007 in Montreal by taking on a handful of surplus letters from another organization and committing to finding them penpals. Since then it has grown exponentially as word travels inside prisons. The project is run by an all-volunteer group. An outside collective of about 6-10 people answers letters, sends resources inside, and compiles the newsletter. An inside advisory committee of 4-8 people helps choose newsletter themes, reviews new resources to be added, and offers general feedback on the functioning of the project.
Shelter Housing Justice Network - The Shelter and Housing Justice Network (SHJN) is a network of homelessness and housing advocates, shelter providers, healthcare professionals, faith leaders, legal workers, and researchers who have come together to address the issue of homelessness in Canada on a local, provincial, and national level. Responding to the homelessness crisis through a humanitarian approach, SHJN seeks to raise awareness and demand change as it relates to emergency shelter, social housing, and the protection of human rights.
Voices From the Bond - Residents of The Bond shelter hotel speak out about conditions on twitter.
Remember Every Name - We are a group of survivors and supporters focused on honouring those who were laid to rest at the Huronia Regional Cemetery who come together for mutual support to share our life stories along with the success and accomplishments we have had since leaving the institution.
Encampment Solidarity Network Parkdale - instagram page on organizing with unhoused folx continuing from Summer of 2021 struggles to support the existence of encampments in TO.
Disability Justice Network of Ontario - DJNO believe that institutionalization is a result of the same systems of incarceration that removes, isolates and confines community members in psychiatric institutions, emergency shelters, and prisons. We believe in an end to the warehousing, caging, and incarcerating of people instead of providing care and justice. All levels of government must work together to deinstitutionalize, and to invest in alternative solutions to long-term care. Long-term care must be abolished.
Invisible Institutions - Invisible Institutions is a community knowledge hub documenting the ongoing institutionalization of persons with disabilities across Canada. This project aims to build awareness about the ongoing realities of institutionalization across Canada through research, capacity building, and knowledge mobilization. Institutionalization is the ongoing removal, isolation, and confinement of people with disabilities from their communities into small or large sites of confinement, like long-term care homes, psychiatric institutions and prisons.
Carceral Cultures - a research initiative that aims to generate knowledge about Canada's culture of punishment that informs and gives meaning to related penal policies and practices. Here you will find information about our completed and on-going studies.
Carceral Geography - CG is a growing sub-discipline within human geography, and the Carceral Geography Working Group aims to provide a network for researchers working in this area.
Joint Effort - abolitionist collective of formerly incarcerated folx and their allies
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty - is a direct-action based anti-poverty organization formed in 1990. We are based in Toronto but work on issues that affect people across the province and are in solidarity with similar movements across the country and around the world. In addition to mobilizing people in resistance to government and corporate policies responsible for widespread immiseration and destitution, we also fight alongside individuals navigating social assistance, public housing and other bureaucracies, doing direct action casework to ensure people aren’t denied basic entitlements.
Rittenhouse - Rittenhouse envisions and will work towards a non-carceral, accountable and just society that promotes government responsibility, community accountability, care for all members of society and the resolution of conflicts and social harms without resorting to exclusion and punishment.
Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta Aboliton Coalition - an alliance of groups from across the prairie provinces who collaborate and organize together on issues of prison and police abolition. SMAAC organizes from our specific local contexts in solidarity and recognition of the unique historical, social, economic, and political circumstances that inform the development and maintenance of penal systems and institutions in the region. SMAAC aims to support ongoing prisoner struggles and to build a strong, networked penal abolition movement in the prairie provinces. #FreePrairiePrisoners #FreeThemAll
Toronto Prisoner’s Rights - a volunteer organization of former prisoners, people with loved ones inside, activists, front-line workers, artists, researchers, educators and students. We engage in direct action, public education, and mutual aid to shed light on the harms caused by incarceration and connect prisoners with social, financial, legal and health supports. We are committed to abolition and building sustainable communities rooted in community care, transformative justice, and accountability.
Recounting Huronia Archive This archive of photography, institutional records, interviews, and artwork is meant to help people understand the history of the Huronia Regional Centre and other institutions like it. First and foremost this archive is for survivors who might be looking for information about Huronia. It is also for family members, caregivers, students, researchers, and members of the general public who want to know more about what life was like inside Huronia.
Mapping the Prison Industrial Complex: A Toolkit for Abolitionists The PIC is a national and global force, but one that manifests locally, meaning how it works looks different across time and place. Just as importantly, the PIC is a web, not a flowchart, meaning that each actor within it interacts with one another. There is not one clear point to jump in. We’re mapping relationships of power—not describing a cause-and-effect sequence of events—in a web that includes corporations, developers, nonprofits, the police, government officials both elected and appointed, and the media, among others.
Crackdown podcast
The ongoing overdose crisis is an unprecedented public health emergency. Thousands are dying while activists and researchers call for urgent change. Government isn’t doing enough to address the crisis, and the media is letting them get away with it. So, we’re making our own media.
CRACKDOWN is a monthly podcast about drugs, drug policy and the drug war led by drug user activists and supported by research. Each episode will tell the story of a community fighting for their lives. It’s also about solutions, justice for those we have lost, and saving lives.
The host and executive producer of CRACKDOWN is Garth Mullins, an award-winning documentarian and longtime community organizer. Garth has been an opioid user for years, injecting heroin daily all the way through the last overdose crisis, and is now on methadone. The podcast is led by an editorial board made up of some of Vancouver’s most experienced drug user activists. CRACKDOWN is produced by Cited Media Productions on the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-waututh) Nations.
Invisible Institutions
is a new documentary podcast exploring the past and present of institutions for people labelled with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Canada.
Creator and host Megan Linton, a disability researcher and writer, investigates the unreported and invisibilized harms of the institutional system. Join her on her journey to the grounds of current and former institutions, including interviews with survivors, community activists, and experts, as they work together to expose the exploitation, isolation, resistance and survival facing people labeled with disabilities.
Find Invisible Institutions on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Amazon Music, and Podbean.
http://invisibleinstitutions.com/
We Want You To Listen: Shelter Video Project
Shelter Video Collective (video 70 mins)
With the attacks on unhoused folks in encampments, the city of Toronto is trying to say that being in the shelter system is ‘safer’ than being on the streets. On September 14, 2021 the Toronto Homeless Memorial added the names of 16 unhoused people who died in the month of August. Over half of these deaths occurred in the shelter system.
Shelter Video Collective members worked for five years on this urgent, timely project in which they bravely speak out, despite risk of reprisal, about the dehumanizing shelter conditions that they endured in the context of a gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood. In the video, collective members share their lived expertise of being unhoused, poverty, disability, racism, classism, stigmatization, gentrification, the decimation of nature, institutional violence and the carceral continuum.
email: sheltervideoproject@gmail.com to view film
What World Do You Live In?
What World Productions (2014, video 90 mins)
What World Do You Live In began as a collaborative video and activism project between long-time community filmmaker Rebecca Garrett and Sanctuary, a church community drop-in. It evolved into an unflinching documentary immersion into a world of resistance to police and security guard violence against people who are poor, homeless, and racialized in Toronto. “We have to stop calling the police,” says activist Anna Willats. The message resonates in dozens of stories collected by street pastor Doug Johnson Hatlem. Stunning testimony, images, and commentary are woven together with unique video of police assaults and previously unreleased footage from multiple important events in Toronto. Conflict erupts over nonviolent responses to overwhelming police impunity. Meanwhile, the increasing militarization of public spaces forces us all to ask: What World Do You Live In?
INQUIRIES: whatworldproductions@gmail.com
The gristle in the stew: revisiting the horrors of Huronia
What happened at Huronia Regional Centre was the stuff of nightmares. Huronia was a government-run institution for children with developmental disabilities, located in Orillia, Ontario. It was shut down in 2009, after more than a century of operation.
Parents were told their children would be well taken care of, their special needs attended to. They were told that leaving their children in the institution's care was the right thing to do. But instead, children were neglected and abused.
Marie and Pat lived at Huronia from childhood into their young adult lives. In 2011, CBC's David Gutnick produced a documentary about the atrocities that took place at Huronia and reported on a class action lawsuit that Marie and Pat were filing against the province of Ontario.
(image by nancy viva davis halifax)
Rooted in Resistance: How movements and leaders blossom in the places they’re not supposed to grow
People who have struggled against oppression within the Prison-Industrial Complex become leaders of our struggles against the PIC outside—from challenging capitalist ways of thinking that perpetuate oppression, to embracing life-affirming values and principles rooted in resistance. At this NYC TJ Hub session, Andrea James of The National Council with the director of Releasing Aging People in Prison (RAPP), Jose Saldana and co-founder Laura Whitehorn, including contributions from two currently incarcerated organizers, Stevie & K. Participants will share their struggles and successes building transformative relationships, practices of accountability, and networks of community care inside jails and prisons.
I am the foundation of corporate capitalism, I fell between the cracks and now exist there
(video 7.5 min, 2010)
by Lynda Solowynsky and Kim Jackson
An experimental short video in which Solowynsky speaks to discrimination that she faced in the medical system as it pertains to poor people who are stigmatized for mental health non-normativity. She also addresses the trauma impact of the training school that she was in and the importance of lived experience vs. professionalism.
Video presented: November 18-20, 2010 for the McMaster University conference: Health, Embodiment and Visual Culture; Engaging Publics and Pedagogies.
We Have a Message: Women’s Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness
Monograph publication, Anagraphia Press, Toronto, ON.
Women’s Stories is an art and social justice project that took place in Toronto. We are a group of women from the Junction area who gathered together to do a photo based social arts project: Women’s Stories: Aging, Disability and Homelessness. The intent of this project is to generate knowledge about the realities of poverty through photography and narratives. We intend to understand how the health of the aging woman’s body is impacted by precarious housing and poverty. Ultimately we have identified a need to work with each other towards change.
We want to speak about our experience with the intention that these issues do not get ignored.
Building on a community collaboration, Women’s Stories has worked to develop democratized ways of generating knowledge within community settings. It draws upon affective, arts-informed, and performative strategies while contributing to possibilities that engage our capacity to produce different knowledge and to produce knowledge differently.
Abolitionist Social Work: Possibilities, Paradox and Praxis
As demands to defund the police often look to social work as an alternative, panelists Tanisha "Wakumi" Douglas, Mimi Kim, Kirk "Jae" James and Cameron Rasmussen discuss the cautions of and possibilities for abolitionist social work. Social work, historically and today, has been deeply embedded in systems of carceral control. With social work's legacy of ties to policing and oppressive family regulation through the child welfare system, the social work community is actively imagining and working towards a social work rooted in abolition, turning to traditions of resistance that also characterize its history. This conversation, organized by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW) in partnership with Haymarket Books will look at challenging carceral social work through the development and practice of an abolitionist social work.
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