A year after the murder of Trayvon Martin still fresh in our collective memory, a Facebook thread of community leaders within the city of Toronto in November 2014, sowed the seeds for a child-friendly, accessible, spiritual event that would go on to inform the founding principles of Black Lives Matter—Toronto (BLM-TO), the first iteration of #BlackLivesMatter outside of the US.

This initial action centered the experience of Black communities in Canada, that uplifted the local stories not grabbing the headlines. This was the awakening and resurgence of Black activism in Canada.

Within 2 years, the momentum of Black Lives Matter in Canada grew significantly, growing demand for national organizing became clear.

Co-Founder

Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism is a vessel that seeks to nurture Black radical creation in Toronto and beyond. Inspired by Octavia Butler’s evocative novel, this artist-run centre aims to be fertile ground for Black creativity and organizing

Wildseed was birthed by Black Lives Matter artivists who hope to build an enduring space that could cultivate the most transformative and radical ideas from Toronto’s diverse Black communities.

Co-Founder & Executive Team

Advocating for the rights of prisoners, working towards prison abolition

We are 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.

Active Member & Co-curator of the “We Keep Each Other Safe Mural Project”.

Blackness Yes! is a community-based committee that works year-round to celebrate Black queer and Trans history, creativity and resistance. Our mandate is to create a space for LGBTIQQ2S folks of African decent and their friends, loved ones and supporters. We work to affirm, celebrate and ensure visible Black LGBTTIQQ2S communities within Pride; to create a Black cultural space within Pride that any Black or Black affirming person can be a part of; and to create a vehicle for HIV/AIDS information dissemination. We create spaces of resistance and celebration at Toronto’s Pride festival and at other community-based events year-round in Toronto.

We are committed to anti-oppression, (self) love freedom and justice. We are a space of resistance and actively fight systemic racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, classism and colonialism.

Co-Curator

The Black Triangle Arts Collective engages guests to join the collective on a project–to-project basis, working collaboratively to research, create and present exhibitions, spark dialogue and develop curatorial practice from intersectional and disability-informed perspectives. Our work does not strive to duplicate artist/curator relationships, but instead intentionally disrupts these power dynamics through processes that are interdependent, empowering, and built on divergent strengths and weaknesses. We are inspired by radical disability justice theory, critical prisoners justice theory and activism and the important work of black feminist scholars, including Kimberle Crenshaw and the Combahee River Collective. These scholars articulate the need for a consideration of the intersectional experiences of those living on the margins, in particular black and Indigenous Deaf and disabled people and disabled and Deaf people of colour. We intentionally work under the label of the black triangle - a symbol used by the Nazi party to label, shame, segregate, control and exterminate a diverse group of people who typically survived on the margins of society, and whose bodies, minds, abilities, sexualities, political views, status, gender, or thoughts were deemed non-conforming, and undesirable.

Founding Co-Curator/Artist