Gigi Grant

Gigi Grant is an artist, project leader, and community organizer activating beauty and creation to bring forward social change.

About

Major Projects:

163 Queen East Health Justice Hub
Leading SPRE Development and Community Hub for HIV+ and Displaced Peoples

Unity Kitchen Toronto
Developing a Street Level Resource Center for Houseless Peoples in Downtown Toronto

Church of the Holy Trinity
Renewing the identity and legacy of a 180 year old church dedicated to social justice

Prisoners’ Justice and Support
Building justice, compassion and alternatives to incarceration through community development and arts creation.

Toronto Homeless Memorial
Leading Toronto’s monthly community ritual and advocacy pillar remembering the lives of houseless peoples.

Interventions, installations and Publications:

Festival of Shelter
Unity Recycled Textile Printing
Voices of Women For Peace Service
Disappearing Space Poster
Jane Doe Wheatpaste
Memorial Tiles
175 Anniversary Book and Collages
Service Bulletins
Encampment Wreath
Ascension Poem and Photos
An Anarchist Response to HIV/HCV Design
HIV Criminalization Advocacy

Artworks














About

Contact:
Giiigiiiigrant@gmail.com
Linkedin
Instagram




Gigi Grant was born in a small farming community in southern Ontario on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee Nations, where she grew up in the Lutheran church among quilting bees, pancake dinners and harvest festivals. There she was inspired by Mennonite relief and shared resource building, and farm worker organizing for the rights of the land and the people. She took this early inspiration for collective and participatory action across her work- which has grown through years of embedded practice in communities living and impacted by HIV/AIDS, People who use drugs, Prisoners, Migrants and many others across Ontario and Quebec to form resilient, cooperative, transformative communities of care.

She is a fine artist and poet, who has staged many public art interventions to emphasize community power and place. Her poetry and compositions have been published in a number of literary publications, and most recently award winning for Displacement City on University of Toronto Press.

She is a skilled group facilitator, who builds creative process and ritual to support organizations, movements and leaders facing loss or trauma in their communities. She uses group art and ritual building to develop new narratives, deepen relationships, and creating moments of transformation and change. Through her work with AIDS Bereavement and Resiliency Program of Ontario, she provided process and growth facilitation for the WORKS Overdose Prevention site, and many other social, health and harm reduction initiatives across Ontario. She has led many intensive group retreats in the Federal prison setting, to support transformative justice and collective organizing of Prisoners.

She led the renewal of Church of the Holy Trinity, a historic church in downtown Toronto with a legacy of radical welcome, social justice and groundbreaking progressive firsts in Canada. Building on a 180 year legacy of arts and culture focused on social action, she programmed a robust catalogue of concerts, exhibitions, talks, and immersive retreats, connecting with new audiences while threading continuous strands to its past. 

Leading through COVID-19, she developed Unity Kitchen, a street level resource hub that brought together houseless people and the communities around them as equals to find resilience and relief during a global pandemic.  Building a platform of positive and generative community action, she supported a collective of houseless peoples and people who hear voices to use the arts and new media creation to challenge displacement and disenfranchisement. 

She led a multi-year project to create a public facing hub site, that would embody their histories, while working to new dimensions and to offer the space to new peoples and ideas. Securing funding for this multi-milllion dollar development, she led the remodeling of Holy Trinity’s 3 campus buildings, to provide affordable shared working accommodations and shared use spaces for cultural production, workshops and events. She led the development of an anchor program to resource and support groups and practitioners convening on the campus site, serving 300 persons per day.

Her most recent efforts have been the development of 163 Queen East Health Justice Hub, where she led the social purpose real estate development and retrofitting of a 40,000 Sq. ft. previously vacant Toronto Center office space. She led the animation, network building and operation of this new community hub to develop many strategic, interdisciplinary initiatives such as rapid access telemedicine support for undocumented peoples, a social enterprise event space and employment launchpad, and a community kitchen and catering enterprise activator providing lunch for 100+ people per day.

She additionally fundraised and worked directly with the community to build a high quality art gallery, event space and recording studio, emphasizing the need for access to creation spaces and exhibition venues that tell the stories of marginalized and displaced peoples. These community access resources helped to platform many artists, musicians and culture leaders who’s work now challenges unjust systems, and offers beauty and life to the world around them.

Gigi is also a Trans parent and wife, an avid permaculturalist, and is deeply in love with her wife and child and garden.



 

Awards-

Outstanding Contribution to Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment for Newcomer, BIPOC and Indigenous Women in Ontario- Presented by MPP Kristyn Wong-Tam, High Commissioner to Kenya, Carolyne Kamender Daudi- 2025

2024 Transfeminine Artist Prize- Presented by Efflora Foundation for Trans Health, 2024


Consulting services-

Not-for-profit/NGO organizational support and project management including fundraising, grant writing, strategic planning, donor relations, financial management, communications, advocacy, visual identity and social media management, change navigation, staff management, hiring, policy development, trauma informed holistic care, risk and crisis navigation,




163 Queen East Health Justice Hub 


A center for displaced peoples, from here, and around the world.
Website- 163queeneast.com
Instagram- @163queeneast

163 Queen East Health Justice Hub leverages 40,000 Sq. ft. of previously vacant Toronto Center office space, to bring together grassroots community efforts in HIV/AIDS, health innovation, Trans care, Refugee and Migrant action under one roof.

This project conserves real estate for grassroots groups and organizations providing culturally reflexive and responsive health and social support.

Beginning before COVID-19, 7 HIV/AIDS organizations serving Black, Indigenous, Newcomers, Prisoners, and street-involved peoples, came together to vision our sector, and how we could protect real estate for our grassroots organizations. Toronto People with AIDS Foundation led these efforts to secure a 40,000sq. ft. building as a donation from a private donor, which in 2023, began to operationalize as a space of community support, gathering, cultural events, and organizing- working across a network of organizations, initiatives and community leaders to develop a vision of a community health justice hub. Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic our visioning revealed the need for intersectional health, safety and justice organizing for the many, many peoples who continue to struggle to find stability and security in Toronto and across the GTA.



Gathering a table of community leaders, members fo HIV organizations and other social movements, we held extensive consultations, not just about what the hub should look like, but also how it should feel, and its principles.  We visioned a hub that could speak equally and directly to the overlapping needs of migrants and newcomers living with HIV, many in the shelter system across Toronto- the houseless person, living in constant health and mental health precarity-  and the longterm survivors of HIV, now coping with the financial insecurity and isolation of ageing with a disability.

Inspired by the work of permaculturists, we thought about how we could create a social and physical architecture that sought not to force an narrative or idea, but could resource and grow the interests, gifts and abilities of our communties.

This non-interventionist approach to social purpose space buillding allowed for a vibrant landscape of community life and cultural leadership to emerge. Instead of rigid programming and purpose, our stakeholders found a blank canvas of resources that they could tap directly into their experiences, and bring forward their ideas to address the challenges they faced in Canadian society.

We worked to shape a resource hub around the lives of people- to create space for their expressions of health and wellness, of culture and celebration. Our job being to witness, support and scaffold the good ideas materializing before us.



This hub grew in partnership with organizations specifically serving the Black, Indigenous, Trans and Refugee communities- including Hope For Refugees, and the Ubuntu Collective, both funded by the Federal Women and Gender Equality Portfolio, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, and supported by the City of Toronto Confronting Anti-Black Racism Committee. Through these partnerships, and through the growth and capacity of PWA Toronto as the hub anchor,  this essential community resource now has a traffic of 2500 people per week.

Working across these partnerships, we were successful in fundraising as a coalition to build out new infrastructure such as a large social enterprise event space, commercial kitchen, recording studio, makers spaces, and a high quality art gallery and performance space.

Now these bookable community resources are used by groups within the hub and networks for social action across the GTA. Each of these resources providing opportunity for advancement and employment in a supportive, affirming, and human-centered setting.

163 Queen East specifically emphasizes the need for safe spaces for HIV+ and LGBTQ+ refugees and newcomers.  Throughout the development of this hub, we recognized the gap in need for safe and uplifting spaces for newcomers, that they are the most at risk for gender-based violence, live in the most precarious housing, and have the least consistent access to essential social and health services. This well-being gap can only be closed through community initiatives that create safety, return personal power, and offer opportunities for self-determination and growth. This volunteer driven hub project, has worked with hundreds of refugees and newcomers to build their skills, obtain permanent residency, and advance in Canadian society. Many of whom have gone on to successful employment, securing lasting housing, and continuing to give back as culture and community leaders.

Process of renovation between 2023-2025:




Initiated at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in Canada, People With AIDS Foundation was created through grassroots cooperation of lovers, partners and families, to support the sick and dying, and make action for life-affirming care and treatment. Now 36 years later, HIV and human health disparity continues to impact our communities across the world. Launching 163 Queen East, PWA fulfills the vision of these grassroots movement leaders- continuing their mission to create a world where all people are deserving of health, and where no one is excluded from justice, equity and love.  

Over the past ten years, HIV has resurged in its impact on the Global South. Global cuts to social funding, medicine, education and community development have allowed for HIV to continue to compromise health of the most disenfranchised and under-resourced.


HIV has mirrored to us the most extreme consequences of colonialism, drawing a map of financial and social immobility through its endemic regions.

Coupled with rising homophobia, transphobia, and gender based violence, refugees and newcomers from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, have come to Canada, seeking freedom from violence and oppression, as well as care for them and their families. Global south migration has become increasingly a point of rallying for far-right movements and governments across the world, and even within their displacement, the many seeking health and safety find difficult and isolating conditions in the first world. LGBTQ+ and HIV Positive newcomers face some of the highest rates of discrimination within Canada, and are at the highest risk of homelessness, human trafficking and abuse. Often facing a double racism in Canadian society, HIV+ newcomers face stigma and rejection in their diasporic communities, while facing exclusion from Canadian social, legal and labour protections.

The development of 163 Queen East Health Justice Hub brings together legacy grassroots organizations, health services, and new and emerging community organizations to address the new landscape of HIV and human health disparity.

In the same way that the first LGBTQ+ and HIV+ grassroots volunteers came together to radically resist death and disappearance with life, we come together as a community to imagine new world of love and justice for all.

Responding to the increasing support challenges for migrants, we developed a high quality health and social service integration for people experiencing multiple and complex care needs- example, development of a telemedicine program for refugees and undocumented peoples, to within the same day, see a doctor virtually, have their HIV/Trans care medication filled and delivered, be able to access housing and settlement/social support services, access a food bank or volunteer prepared lunch program, connect across partner groups representing specific culture or community need, and to do this in a place of free cultural expression, safe from LGBTQ+ persecution, racism, transphobia.




163 Queen East was selected for investment by United Way of Greater Toronto as part of their Expanding Community Spaces Campaign. This investment ignites partnership by creating an incubation and growth environment for non-profit, grassroots organizations serving queer, Trans, Black, Latinx, Indigenous and Refugee communities across the GTA.

Retrofitting 5000 sq. ft. as a Launch and Grow space to support the ongoing growth and innovation of grassroots groups who would otherwise be unable to afford space in the downtown core- further conserving real estate for community action. 

New and growing groups serving the most marginalized persons in Canadian society often face the pitfall of receiving seed funding, do important and lifesaving work, but are unable to create the sustainability and permanence that comes with a physical space.

This launch and grow space sought to detangle organizations and groups with good ideas and initiatives, from the precarity of funding cycles and the high entry cost to community space in the GTA. What has emerged has been the creation of a holistic environment, where organizations can interconnect, support their membership, andin turn be supported by the resources and community present at this hub.

163 Queen East was produced in partnership with:







Unity Kitchen Toronto





Instagram- @trinity.community.hub

Unity Kitchen Street Level Hub was developed in March 2020 as an emergency pandemic response for the poor, street involved, and marginalized Downtown Toronto community.  

What began as a community mutual aid project quickly evolved into a site of challenge and policy change for how cities and municipalities across Canada respond to homelessness and disenfrachisement.


Positioned directly beside Toronto City Hall, and nestled between major banks, investment firms, and malls, this island of freedom within Toronto’s downtown core sought to visibilize and interrogate the growing disparities across our society.  We publicly and creatively challenged the notions of who is afforded presence and place in our cities, who gets to set our social policy, and how the rapid monetization of housing and public space has created exclusion zones for the most marginalized among us. Through Unity Kitchen, we offered an alternative to a growing monoculture, where the excluded were leading, creating, reclaiming, at the center of supporting one and other- demonstrating their presence directly to a world around them that sought their constant displacement and disappearance. 

With a DIY attitude and a loud punk voice, Unity Kitchen cut through the silence and isolation of COVID-19, to bring forward these interrogations and a glimpse into a reality that was under the surface of Canadian society.

With this voice, we cast a hopeful message, that through collaboration and participation, change can happen.

Unity Kitchen offered an outlet for many who too felt isolated and forgotten, some for the first time in their lives. From across our city, people of different ages, abilities, classes, came together in unity, to offer something to the whole. Through this volunteering we realized how important creating purpose and meaning is in times of crisis. Something we broadcast back to the world using new medias and art interventions, reflecting a feeling of generative energy and abundance in a time of scarcity. Unity Kitchen  ‘I have everything inside me that I need to heal, change and lead my community.

Over the course of 4 years, Unity Kitchen brought together hundreds of volunteers, countless organization and movement partners, served more than 100,000 meals cooked on site, and distributed countless amounts of tents, sleeping bags, clothing and all other necessities. Through music, arts, dance, celebration and ritual, we returned power and place to our communities and forged new culture leaders who have applied this transformative ethos to many projects and interventions across Canada.

With this as our foundation, we were able to launch significant health and social interventions like the first barrier-free and in-situ COVID-19 health responses, the development of shelter hotels, and community based overdose prevention.

Through taking responsive collective action, Unity Kitchen challenged the landscape of community and health organizations, calling them to return to their grassroots identity, and social voices.




Press for Unity Kitchen-

Seeking Sanctuary- Written by Stephanie Bai, Maisonneuve Magazine
https://maisonneuve.org/article/2021/06/21/seeking-sanctuary/
Winner- 45th National Magazine Awards

Displacement City- Edited by Greg Cook and Cathy Crowe, University of Toronto Press
https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487546496
Winner - 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Social Justice awarded by Foreword Reviews

Pam McConnell Women in Leadership Award, Head Chef and co-founder Tara Currie- https://www.gtaweekly.ca/city-of-toronto-presents-the-pam-mcconnell-award-for-young-women-in-leadership-unveils-look-at-what-we-have-achieved-memorial-sculpture/

Unity Kitchen Living Archive- https://unitykitchenlivingarchive.tumblr.com







Unity Kitchen In partnership with Sanctuary Toronto formed the first supported encampment sites in the Municipality, to provide immediate safety and respite from the onset of COVID-19. This action was directly in conflict with City of Toronto policy of removing homeless persons from public space within 12 hours. Working with houseless peoples, a flurry of interventions formed around the encampment addressing food security, health, mental health, access to housing, safety for women and Trans peoples, and Indigenous sovreignity in the urban environment. 

Together with the community that formed around the church, volunteers and houseless peoples launched projects directly form their creativity and gifts that imagined what a post-consumer world could look like. These projects and initiatives were as much about essential need, as resisting continuous removal from public space.



The era leading up to the pandemic saw immense growth of the real estate industry in downtown Toronto. The municipality banked on the ongoing influx of cash from development fees, in turn designating real estate developers, major corporations voice in local governance and social policy to encourage their investment.

Fees that were intended for the creation of social housing or development of community resources instead went to the activation of public space as part of a public and private partnership- turning our rapidly shrinking public spaces into accessories of commerce, and redrawing the lines of what is accessible and available to all.  Through this, housless and street involved peoples faced an ongoing project of removal from parks, alleyways, malls, even sidewalks- while police and outreach teams hurried them off to drop-in centers, and out of public eye. This intentional action of grooming the social landscape was part of a bigger phenomenon happening in Toronto, and across Canada. Pejorative and stigmatizing social action for the poor, disabled, drug-using and mad became codified in the language of health and harm reduction. Even Business Improvement Areas would receive public funding to hire staff to shuffle people off the street and from one overloaded drop-in center to the next.  Removing unwanted people became as routine as maintaining the grass in a park,  all to make a landscape encouraging of investment and maximizing the investment value of real estate. This harsh reality for houseless people became all too visible at the onset of the pandemic, when all community and social services were shuttered, as well as the informal network of resources that they relied on like malls, buildings and washrooms. Even after the shutdown, this phenomenon of upheaval and removal continued. Leveraging the historic Church of the Holy Trinity’s property in the downtown core, bordered by Trinity Square Park, we issued permits to anyone seeking shelter, providing them with a tent.

We did not know that the tent would quickly become a symbol of a movement, to refuse disenfranchisement, and reclaim power and place in our society.



Cutting through trauma, displacement, and isolation- the shutdown and silence of COVID brought forward beautiful acts of care, love and respect for community.  Tent cities across Toronto bloomed, and gave opportunity for communities to come together in support of the most marginalized. Hand in hand, families, students, seniors, came together to offer support and volunteer in the many projects happening across the City, breaking out of the monotony of the COVID lockdown.

There may not be specific words for this phenomenon, but because of COVID, there was a flattening of the social hierarchy and people could feel each others experience, understanding each other through our shared survival. These acts of solidarity across class helped to refuse the notion that people are disposable or unworthy of place.  

Working together brought a generative energy and a light of possibility in dim times. It became much harder to justify the forced removal of people in a crisis, especially with a line of grandmothers in front of their tents to tell the trucks to turn around.

Provided with a new voice at City Hall, Unity Kitchen would demonstrate for our shared responsibilty of care,  and how it should inform our policy making and practices, leading to the creation of a designated human rights framework for houseless and street-involved peoples. Holding press conferences, creating media, fundraising and distributing resources, forming and participating in Canada wide networks, this savvy group of houseless peoples and their allies contributed their vision and dream to many organizations, justice movements and actions emerging in the post-COVID landscape. Now a vibrant community hub, the story of Unity Kitchen lives on as a roadmap of social change.

Unity Kitchen was produced in partnership with:



Church of the Holy Trinity


Holy Trinity leveraged a small campus across three buildings in Trinity Square to build a resource space for grassroots movements and networks.

In 2018, the shrinking but dedicated church congregation sought a new model and direction for its buildings and resources that would embody their histories, while working to new dimensions, to offer the space to new peoples and ideas.

We embarked on a multi-year journey to create a community hub space that offered affordable shared working accommodations, shared use spaces for cultural production, to host workshops and events, and that had a core program that could resource and support the network of artists, groups and practitioners convening around it’s campus.

The biggest transformation this community would go through in this project, was recognizing the changes that happened around them. After many decades of working to build inclusive community, increasing wealth desparity had caused a crisis of desperation and mental health disability in the downtown core. No longer home to left bank philosophers, artists and activists that had called Holy Trinity home, the stark division between the ultra-wealthy and the poor was marked by intense policing,  public mental health crisis, and a downtown core that felt explosively divided.

Focusing on the themes of reconciliation and renewal of our society who are supported by our grassroots organization incubator. Through this project, Holy Trinity offers subsidized rent of office and programming space, as well as organizational support to these smaller sized organizations making an impact in our community.

Through this incubator space, these organizations are able to share and collaborate on solving equity and justice issues, and as well lend themselves to the animation of community life in the downtown core, and broaden the scope of helping or advocacy projects, drawing on the expertise of this group of partner organizations. 

The Toronto Homeless Memorial helps to anchor these organizations within our campus. It is a physical memorial for the thousands who have died on the streets of Toronto. It is a symbol of the intersections of each of our work. It was well attended in person, and now that we have taken this memorial online, it extends its reach to participants across the country. Many of whom have lost a loved one and want a space to remember and honour their life. 

The highest concentration of street involvement and poverty in Toronto's downtown core exists within a 10 block radius of Yonge/Dundas square- we see on a daily basis, and hear from the Yonge-Dundas BIA, the City, and social service partners that the existing services are insufficient to the amount of need in this area. They also exist winthin the highest per capita concentration of shelter services, now housing up to 1500 persons in this radius with another 1000 more directly outside of this zone. 

There was a need for a coordinated response to the community health and safety of this area, that requires the collaboration of multiple groups and practitioners, to support the intersecting whole person well-being needs of these populations. Fostering a hub space through which collaboration can occur, led by-and-for populations that are most impacted by poverty and its' consequences, and that individuals do not have to choose between meeting basic needs, and issues like health care or harm reduction support, is essential. 

COVID created a level of service scarcity and inconsistency that has caused a further marginalization of these communities, and a heightened risk for violence, overdose, health and mental health crisis. We also see that for individuals living on the street or in shelters, that there is a lack of culturally appropriate community spaces and advancement opportunities to engage with, through volunteering, and participation in community events.

Today, Trinity comUNITY Hub continues to make interdisciplinary action for health and safety for our City’s most marginalized, and to continue to offer a place of welcome, to free concerts, talks, art classes and many more vibrant initiatives that emerged while this community continues to live into their legacy.

Surrounded by major banks, multi-national corporations, and the Toronto Eaton’s Center, Holy Trinity stares in the face of a global capitalist power that seeks to commodify all parts of our shared labour and shared world. Finding a depth of spirituality in what could be freely offered in community, Holy Trinity embraced an ethos of free welcome and abundance.

Reinvigorating and continuing it’s community’s 180 year legacy of radical hospitality, spirituality and creativity, this project redefined its campus as a site of resistance against capitalist depersonalization. Through arts, music, dance, food and celebration, Holy Trinity became an island of inspiration for new generations seeking a place of free expression, uniqueness and love.




Toronto Homeless Memorial

Every second Tuesday of the month, Toronto’s Homeless Memorial host a memorial event to celebrate the lives and relationships of people who have died on the streets. Now a digital monument, an in person service, and broadcast online, this memorial is one of the few places where the names of houseless, poor and disenfranchised people can be spoken and rememembered in their passing. The memorial serves as a gathering place for advocacy and action on social housing, harm reduction and an end to the criminalization of the poor. It an era where the expected outcome for poor people is exclusion and death, this memorial carves a physical space out of this dire reality. It shouts loudly the human life behind each name, honouring the child, parent, friend, lover, companion in each- and challenges us to act to protect our shared humanity. 




Toronto Homeless Memorial Website
Video Archive







Prisoners’ Justice and Support

1. Photos taken between 2014-2018 in and around Ontario Federal Penitentiaries, along with accompanying artwork. This series looks at the unseen human landscape of the prison setting- where ominous architecture is broken by light, helping to dissolve the walls imagining the children, parents, partners, caregivers, within. 


2. Prisoners’ Justice Day T-shirt printing between 2017-2024


3. This Prisoners’ Justice Day Exhibition was mounted at 163 Queen East in partnership with Native Arts Society  and Ubuntu Black Trans Collective during August of 2024. Using the textile work of Faith Ringgold as a template, a group of more than 50 Migrants from around the world painted the pattern and put words to their experience of ‘prison’- from migrant detention, to borders, to rising social exclusion and isolation. These quilts were coupled with works by former Federal Prisoner and leathercrafter Brian Hickey, Chelston Nichols, currently incarcerated Inuk activist and artist Kevin Harper, and poetry by Tru Stewart. The works sought to interrogate the growing prison industrial complex, and its use of a global colonial system of displacement to create a prison without walls. 



4. Working with one of the longest serving Canadian Prisoners, Greg McMaster, we used archival photography he collected across his journey in Federal prisons, to animate intimate lectures about his experience, building Prisoner justice advocacy, and offering insight to legal, health and social practitioners on the need for their support in Prisoner health and rights reform. These presentations were keynotes at Dala Lana School for Public Health annual conference in 2018, and Osgoode Hall Students association Conference in 2019, and were shown in many other venues. This marked the first time that a Federal serving Prisoner was able present digitally at a conference or meeting, changing the rules on technology for greater community participation and connection for Prisoners in Canada



5. In collaboration artists and Federal Prisoners Jeremy Hall,  Tim Felfoldi and Gregory McMaster, these articles were published in TTTism Magazine, offering a contemporary look at tattooing in Canadian Prison, highlighting the art, the life and struggles for justice that these incarcerated artists endure to produce their work.  Text by artist and modern tattooer, Sally.


6. Pamphlets and guides supporting popular education and better resources for Prisoners in Federal incarceration made in partnership with Prisoners’ HIV/AIDS Support Action Network and Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange.



Voices of Women for Peace Quilt Service

The Voices of Women for Peace Quilt Service was a public presentation of a quilt with the voices of young women and girls who have been impacted by conflict and the global military industrial complex. The quilting project was led by artist Kathrin Winkler, followed by the marriage vows of Angel Summer and Jade Deluca. 

Jane Doe Wheatpaste

The Jane Doe Wheatpaste was a community art intervention mounted on the exterior wall of Church of the Holy Trinity, adjacent to the entrance of the Toronto Eaton’s Center. This poem by Don Weitz, a founding member of the Toronto Homeless Memorial, was used to highlight the ongoing murder of Indigenous women, girls and two-spirited peoples- especially those living on the streets of Canada’s major cities. The work was mounted in the fall of 2022, which marked record breaking deaths in the shelter and shelter hotel system, and the intentional arson of a tent shared by 2 Indigenous women near to the site of installation. The work was produced by members of the Trinity Square encampment.


JANE DOE

you froze to death at 30 below
Your sisters sunstroked at 40 above
no respite, no warming, no cooling centre to care or love

in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa the RCMP, cops, and mayors, don't seem to care,  if they ever did nobody stopped to give you a loonie or dime in rain, snow, sleet, in the wind or sunshine nobody stopped to touch, to say "hi" or hello don't ya know, don't ya know, don't ya know crowded shelters turned you away while mayors, councillors, ministers lied brothers, friends, shouted loud and long.

"She's gone. She's lost," sisters cried and cried no justice, no peace, no safety, no home Your kids never found, lost to suicide while ministers committed genocide
You barely survived third world welfare no heat, no clean water, no healthcare

Jane Doe you died, alone, stigmatized racialized-traumatized-criminalized nameless, homeless, no direction home nameless, homeless, no direction home

Missing, Murdered Women, and Girls on stolen lands no justice, no peace, for Native bands lane Doe, Jane Doe, where are you now tell us, where you, must be found Your spirit rising like the phoenix like a smoke signal rising from sacred ground

Justice, peace, reconciliation, truth wherever found lie deep, deep, asleep, in Mother Earth too scorched, too damaged, to give birth
Jane Doe, Jane Doe, nameless, homeless, tell us your name

By Don Weitz (1930-2021)



Disappearing Spaces Poster

This Disappearing spaces poster offers a verse from Isaiah to remind us of the consequences of development and displacement.


Memorial Tile Installation

These memorial tiles were created in 2023, to offer community in Toronto’s Downtown East and opportunity to physically mark the passing of friends and family. Led by artist and ceramicist Nicole Levaque, these tiles highlight how there is little space for street-involved and houseless peoples to honour and remember passing in their lives. Within a society that has believed for some time that houselessness, substance use and mental health disability are choices, the deaths of many peers, friends, companions go largely without the opportunity for mourning and remembrance.  Through tile making, and public installation, a sense of justice is offered to disenfranchised grief. Each tile representing a resistance to the societal expectation of death, instead replaced with the beauty and joy of being seen and known. This project was mounted at the Toronto Homeless Memorial and is a living, expanding work of art.