Driving change in your community with long-time activist Paul Taylor

By Adele Lukusa | April 28, 2025

THE GREEN LINE'S
CHANGEMAKER INTERVIEW

Driving change in your community with long-time activist Paul Taylor

For one of our Changemakers newsletters, we spoke with Paul Taylor, former FoodShareTO executive director and current co-CEO of Evenings & Weekends Consulting, about community-driven activism.

Portrait of Paul Taylor

A portrait. of Paul Taylor.
📸: Samuel Engelking.

Adele Lukusa BW

Adele Lukusa

A graduate of TMU, Kitchener native enamoured with Toronto and lover of Jamila Woods. Currently working on supporting mutual aid efforts and unpacking the nuances of Black haircare.

august 2023

Few carry the same grace, empathy and intentionality in their activism as Paul Taylor does.

He's a long-time activist, educator and a co-founder of Evenings & Weekends Consulting, an organization that supports charities and community groups. He was also the executive director of food justice organization FoodShare Toronto for six years.

You can hear it in his voice — the passion that imbues his stories about the Black women in his life, the care he has for the most marginalized in the room and his commitment to organizing with community instead of simply for community.

From introducing four-day workweeks to paying for job interviews and prioritizing experience over degrees, not only does Paul talk the talk, he walks the walk.

What does change mean to you?

It means recognizing how deeply broken our systems are. Sometimes we advance change, but it's not based on a recognition of how deeply our systems are broken and how violent or harmful systems can be. So I think for me, change is often about listening to the people who are most harmed or the most neglected by systems, understanding what that harm looks like, and using that knowledge to support folks in those communities to advance change or to collaborate with folks from those communities to advance change.

Who has inspired your drive and passion for community care?

I often think about why I am the way that I am, and it's largely due to the Black women that came before me. My mother taught me to be curious, she taught me to be brave and she taught me that anything was possible. And my grandmother…taught me that we have a responsibility to community; we need to make sure that we can all move forward together.

I remember being in high school observing the kind of low expectations the teachers [had] of Black students, especially Black boys like myself. One of the things that I did was…right before exams, I would find an empty classroom and host review sessions usually right after basketball practice [for them] and anyone else who was sticking around [after school] that wanted to participate. And [I] recognized that these were the students who weren't being taught to, and these were the students that many of my teachers had given up on. I guess that was the first time that I got to practise some of the things that I had learned from women like my grandmother.

Thinking big picture, what do you believe your role is in bringing significant change to your community?

While I think big change is possible, I don't feel like all of that change is going to happen in my lifetime. What I do think is my job is to take that baton that I've been passed, and hold it with a bunch of people and run together with that baton, and take it as far as we can. Because I recognize that one day — as hard as it might be to believe sometimes — is that we'll be the ancestors, you know? And we want to do everything we can to make life better for those that come after us and those who are going to continue to move with that baton.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

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