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/HC
V Design
HIV Criminalization Advocacy


Artworks










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: