Resources

In 2023, the City of Toronto collaborated with Social Planning Toronto to initiate a capacity-building project. Through this collaboration, Social Planning Toronto developed a "Community Playbook" designed to assist community leaders with concrete knowledge and tools they could use in their local community engagement work across the city. The Community Playbook is an interactive guide with more than 100 pages of resources for residents involved in community engagement projects within their respective networks and neighborhoods to help them in their planning, engagement, funding applications, project coordination, and more. It also incorporates intersectional lens on queerness, gender, race, and class for community engagement projects.

The Community Playbook is not intended to be an exhaustive document but rather a dynamic and interactive resource that supports and motivates community leaders in delivering and monitoring community engagement activities, projects, and events. It helps create engagement strategies and reinforces connections among leaders and community members. 

This joint OCASI-PSI and ACAS (Asian Community AIDS Services) was held on February 1st 2024 and invited four local experts to discuss and address concerns and disinformation among newcomer and diaspora communities around trans and nonbinary curriculum, policy, and practice in Ontario schools. 

The attached recorded includes presentations from three out of four of the event's speakers, responding to questions, such as: 

How has recent legislation in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick around parental consent impacted Ontario?

What are common myths circulating within newcomer communities around LGBTQIA+ content in schools?

How can we support queer/trans youth in schools as parents/community members?

Why are some parents uncomfortable with gender neutral facilities in schools?

Where does fear/ resistance to inclusive school policies come from?

For reasons of necessity, urgency, and sometimes choice, queer Africans cross borders and find their lives unfolding in diasporic spaces. Refugee claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity persecution make up 12% of all refugee cases in Canada, with queer African refugees constituting the largest group within this category. With this in mind, we now have to ask, “what kind of history will be written about the collision between queer Africans dislocated from post-colonial nations and the Canadian settler nation?” In this study, qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted to explore the individual lived experiences of queer African refugees, with a focus on the intricate realignment of sexual orientation, sexual identity, sexual politics, and sexual desire that inevitably emerges through forced migration and the refugee process in Canada. The deep meaning of life experiences is captured in the participants’ own words, providing detailed, in-depth insights into the complexities of their lives, their reflections, and their subsequent responses.

These narratives call attention to the specific features of queer African refugees, who test the limits of the current homonational refugee apparatus. Participants’ experiences of resisting social roles, structures, identities, and expectations that limit queer African refugees and keep them “in their place,” both in their countries of origin and in Canada, are interrogated. The construction of boundaries that decide who belongs and deserves protection within Canada and who does not provides a foundation for engaging in research as a practice of freedom, in order to counter the global narrative of refugee life that excludes queer Africans.

The findings in this research require us to look at practices of exclusion and inclusion in the Canadian refugee system and the tensions that emerge for queer African claimants. In the end, we are left with strategies for how to engage with the politics of knowledge production and advocate for an agenda of social justice and transformation for queer Africans globally.

Nos panelistes, Javi Fuentes Bernal, Laurent Francis Ngoumou, et Jean Francois Chachou partagent leurs expériences vécues en tant que 2SLGBTQIA+ dans le processus d'immigration au Canada, abordant des problèmes urgents locaux et mondiaux. Ce forum vise à partager des bonnes pratiques et développer des stratégies concrètes pour améliorer la sécurisation culturelle au sein des services d'établissement avec un vue critique et complexe.

 Ce webinar qui a eu lieu le 5 décembre 2024, poursuive une discussion sur l'impact des récentes lois transphobes dans plusieurs provinces canadiennes ainsi que les mouvements transphobe et homophobe de l’extreme droite en Ontario sur les jeunes.

On September 25, 2024, OCASI PSI hosted a webinar with three incredible international student activists in our community who educated us about how student movements have historically played, presently play, and will continue to play pivotal roles in social progress. Watch here!