On the power of collective organizing with Megan Kee

Something I’m really passionate about is thinking about how we can support the most vulnerable people in our society. So, I’m passionate about the addiction crisis and the overdose crisis, specifically in the city of Toronto.

I'm on the board of an organization called Street Health, and they basically provide compassionate healthcare to people experiencing homelessness in the Dundas-Sherbourne area. There's a lot of stigma associated with people who use drugs, as well as people who live on the street — and these are policy failures; they're not individual failures.

It’s a personal issue for me, obviously, because of my lived experience with my brother. But people are very quick to dismiss people as lazy, as degenerates. But if we lived in a society that provided people with the support that they need right when they start to struggle — if you have a mental illness, if you struggle with an addiction or a loss or you lose your job — any of these things that we will all face at some point in our lives, then we wouldn't need to have people living on the street and people wouldn't need to turn to drugs to survive living on the street.

I think the measure of success for any government is how well the most vulnerable people in their society are doing, and I think by that measure we are failing at every level. And so it's not just people struggling with mental illness or people struggling with addiction, but it's also people with disabilities.

I am so frustrated by the legislative poverty essentially that we're trapping people with disabilities in, with the incredibly low amount that we provide people through the Ontario Disability Support Program.

So, I think we need to try to change the way society focuses from the end result versus actually intervening earlier on. Nobody needs to suffer in this way, and we have more than enough money to take care of everybody. It's just about changing people's minds, and then changing the policy to reflect that.

How do you work towards a common goal when working with people who aren’t able to give as much of their time and labour?

We will take anything that anybody has capacity to do, with the compassion and understanding that everybody is at a different space in their life — that they have different things going on — but it is super difficult. I mean, even just scheduling a call with more than two people or a Zoom meeting can take weeks sometimes to organize because we're just so overwhelmed and overburdened. I think that's one of the biggest struggles that social justice movements face.

Society is structured in a way that keeps you constantly busy. You’re isolated, so that just reiterates the importance of coming together in community, and just finding those tiny spaces that you have capacity for to be able to organize and to be able to lean on one another. And know that you don't need to do all of it by yourself.

Also, respecting the pace at which things happen. Because we're all limited by our capacity, it means that something that would take a full-time worker a week to do is gonna take us a couple of months to do, and I think that's okay. The importance of self-care is fundamental to sustainability in this work.

This sounds so cliché, but the small little things that we do, even on an individual level, make a difference. And if we continue to all do small little things, it will create change over time. Oftentimes, what makes me feel so depressed is the thought of all of the problems and then thinking as an individual how I am going to fix them, but that's not the way that it works. Sometimes I have to take a step back and remind myself that it's not an individual responsibility, it's a collective responsibility.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.