Resilience isn’t a box to check or a buzzword. It is a method of moving forward without forgetting the past.

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, where Indigenous communities across the land have experienced amplified pre-existing health and economic disparities, resilience has shone a light on the power of communities supporting communities.

When the pandemic was declared in March 2020, friends and philanthropists Victoria Grant and Wanda Brascoupé created the Indigenous Peoples’ Resilience Fund (IPRF).

It is an effort to provide much-needed support and care to Indigenous communities while building community resilience. So far, they have 29 partners, have raised over $14 million, have supported over 35 Indigenous-led organizations with almost $1 million.

They’ve made it possible for communities to receive support for mental health, capacity- building, education, food security and more with a two-week turnaround time for applications, with funding ranging from $5000 to $30,000.

“We wanted to take the onus off of community members so that they could do their job,” says Brascoupé.” We knew that, particularly in a pandemic, they were going to be stretched, so we cared for that at that point.”

Through this work, the IPRF strengthened trust with communities and Laidlaw. Their lived experiences as Indigenous people – Grant is Teme-Augama Anishnabai Kway, Maang Indoden (Women of the Deep Water People, Loon Clan) and Brascoupé is Bear Clan, Skarù re’, Kanien’keha and Anishinabe – have also informed their approach.

Instead of encouraging communities to fit into rigid criteria, which can present barriers and reinforce colonization and anti-Indigenous ideas, Brascoupé and Grant encouraged and empowered communities to self-determine what they needed. “We’d all lived in community so we all had subsets of what we were looking for, and how we could make it theirs,” says Grant.

For example, the application process welcomes all types of submissions, including verbal, video presentation, written, fax and more. Additionally, they’ve created opportunities that wouldn’t be possible in traditional Canadian philanthropy spaces, such as funding non-qualified donees and reporting using Indigenous oral traditions.

The feedback has been positive, even when they’ve had to say no to people.

“Our feedback on our process [has been], ‘I can’t believe how simple this process has been’ and ‘I can’t believe that when I say something, you understand almost immediately’,” says Grant. Putting people first has meant a departure from the language that is often used to describe the relationship between grantees and foundations in a good way: Grant and Brascoupé don’t refer to this support as “grants” to communities they are “gifts” or“bundles”, names which honour the journey that communities take towards change,Getting back to normal has a different meaning for Indigenous communities – continuing to deal with the impact of colonization. Through their work, Grant and Brascoupé push back on the idea to chart a different path of resilience that puts people and communities first. Brascoupé says, “Yes, we have certain guidelines…but when you tell someone ‘Tell us what you need. How would you like to go about doing it?’, that’s when you get to answers, not trying to get to the yes.”

The Youth Action Fund offers grants to grassroots initiatives working with youth who are underserved by the education system and overrepresented in the justice and child welfare systems. The development of this fund was guided by a series of consultations with experts and advocates in the field.

Objectives:

• Elevate the voices of young people with lived experiences in the justice, education,
and child welfare systems

• Support initiatives working on or advocating for early intervention

• Promote equitable and accountable institutions and systems

• Support initiatives working on or advocating for evidence-based policy

• Support initiatives that are informed by youth, families and communities

Supported by the Youth Action Fund, Positive Change TO’s Rise Up Project has created a space for young Somali-Canadians to have these conversations. Over three months, two dozen youth aged 18 to 29 met on Zoom to share their stories and learn about the criminal justice system. The sessions are facilitated by Ayderus Alawi, a Toronto-based criminal defence lawyer who has spent his career addressing issues of anti-Black racism in the legal system.

Youth themselves identified the topics they wanted to discuss: understanding how to interact with the police, reintegration from prison, and where to find information about the legal system.

“Even though we are all Somali, people come from different stages of their life, their lived experiences are different, their genders, and ethnicities. So it’s important to really get a sense of who the youth are when you start opening these discussions,” explains Khadro Abdulle, Positive Change TO’s outreach coordinator.

A recent graduate of the University of Toronto’s criminology program, Khadro is leading the Rise Up Project alongside Mohamed Hassan, another young Somali-Canadian.

In the short-term, the Rise Up Project is about healing, coming together (virtually) as a community, and empowering young Somalis to understand their legal rights. Alongside insights from a series of Black mental health events hosted by Positive Change TO, these themes of discussion will be woven together with ideas and recommendations from youth to develop an advocacy toolkit that will be released later in 2021.

The goal is for the advocacy toolkit to be translated into English and Somali, available online and in printed form, so everyone from elders to young people to policy-makers can better understand how the justice system affects the lives of Somali-Canadian youth. The toolkit will also include interviews with elders about alternative forms of justice—traditional practices from Somali cultures that could be relevant in the Canadian context as a way to avoid incarceration.

Hodan and Khadro state that changing the criminal legal system and ending police violence is a process that takes time. While COVID-19 has temporarily led to less street activity and violence, Somali-Canadians—similar to other Black communities—have faced higher exposure to the virus because many community members are frontline workers.

Ultimately, Hodan says gun and street violence should be treated like a virus and the national epidemic that it is. “You do not address it through policing or arresting more people because the root cause is often socio-economic,” she explains. “If you want to address the social determinants of health then there has to be a broader sense of intentionally investing in our community and in our young people.

The Youth Action Fund offers grants to grassroots initiatives working with youth who are underserved by the education system and overrepresented in the justice and child welfare systems. The development of this fund was guided by a series of consultations with experts and advocates in the field.

Capacity Building provides professional development to Youth Action Fund recipients.

Through the Indigenous Youth and Community Futures Fund (IYCFF), Laidlaw invests in opportunities for Indigenous youth to develop and lead projects where they were immersed in their lands, languages and cultures; participate in everyday acts of resurgence, reclamation and well-being; build relationships within and across Indigenous communities; and learned about and define for themselves what reconciliation means.

In summer and fall 2020, Shelby Gagnon and a group of Indigenous youth in Northwestern Ontario gathered to trap, harvest, process, and preserve traditional foods and medicine. The seven workshops were part of Mino-Wiisini, a youth-led food sovereignty and education project of the Indigenous Food Circle.

In one gathering at Roots to Harvest, a non-profit organization in Thunder Bay, youth were shown how to blend a nutrient-rich emulsion of fish parts and compost to nourish the soil. Other gatherings involved blueberry picking and preserving the berries in jam; making bear grease, and trapping in the Red Rock Indian Band and Aroland First Nation, where Shelby is a community member.

“There’s layers and layers of knowledge held within food. Youth as a generation, we need to keep that knowledge going because so much was lost during colonization,” says Shelby, who is the project coordinator (Mino-Wiisini is Ojibwe for ‘s/he eats well, likes what s/he eats’).

The focus on traditional diets and food sovereignty is about more than making sure people have enough to eat—it’s a connection to culture. Shelby references hunting and honouring a moose. Not only a source of food, the process offers the opportunity to observe and learn from the land, gather as a community for ceremonies and feasts, and craft traditional art or clothing using the whole animal.

Contrast this with the sterile experience of going to a grocery store: buying food off the shelf with little knowledge or appreciation of where it came from or the land from which it was harvested.

“I see the generational impacts of colonialism in our food systems,” expands Shelby. “A lot of my family has health problems caused by how we eat. [Colonization] really disrupted our ways of knowing and living in a healthy, balanced way.”

This disconnect between people and food was compounded during COVID-19 when community members were often only able to afford or access processed foods and had to depend on food banks or food boxes. Greater food sovereignty—the ability to grow, trap, and prepare food from the land—would have lessened this impact.

In applying for the Indigenous Youth and Community Futures Fund, Shelby’s goal was to enable herself and other youth to learn the customary food practices held by elders and knowledge keepers, while also combining her personal interest in the connection between food, art, and land.

Recognizing that many youth and community members may be unable to access the land due to lack of transportation or COVID-19 restrictions, Mino-Wiisini used technology as a tool to transfer traditional knowledge.

In one Facebook Live event, Shelby and Indigenous Food Circle coordinator Jessica Mclaughlin skinned and cleaned a waabooz (rabbit); another session focused on seed saving, and was led by knowledge keeper Audrey Logan who spoke about the history, importance, and use of the Gete Okosomin squash.

As well as these virtual and in-person gatherings, IYCFF supported the hosting of a sweat lodge ceremony, professional and personal development courses, and the ability to pay Indigenous youth, elders, and knowledge keepers for their time and involvement in the project. The grant also covered the cost of producing a series of short videos featuring the 2020 traditional food workshops—a further effort to be inclusive of those who couldn’t attend.

Shelby says she’s excited to be learning these teachings and sees that same sense of enthusiasm in her peers: “It’s feeling proud that you got your hands dirty having spent however long picking blueberries and now you have jam. And it’s the empowerment of being able to do it and the resurgence and resistance that comes with it.”

The Black Youth School Success Initiative (BYSSI) is a collective impact initiative composed of Black-led/focused organizations working to increase the graduation rate for Black youth in the Peel Region.

Fourteen schools host the BYSSI program, which focuses on supporting youth through its pillars of education, safety, health, and community. Since 2018, Black youth in grades 6 through 12 have participated in the BYSSI, and have had a plan of care developed based on their interests and needs. That includes connecting students with community partners who might be best placed to offer those supports and services.

COVID-19 has shifted BYSSI services like tutoring and mentorship online. Crystel Campbell, a youth engagement coordinator with BYSSI, says that while the pivot has been challenging, it has allowed the team to host more guest speakers and experiment with online offerings like a web-based stock market challenge where students learn the basics of saving.

In 2020, BYSSI received a Youth CI Execution Grant to support the implementation of their collective impact initiative. “The Youth CI process was one of the most understanding [funding] processes I’ve ever gone through,” says Chris Thompson, Associate Manager of Community Investment with United Way Greater Toronto.

Both Crystel and Chris say they’ve appreciated the Youth CI experience. “You get to bounce ideas off of one another, especially understanding what’s working and what’s not working,” explains Crystel.

“You get to go and meet others and realize you’re not alone,” adds Chris of the learning lab experience. “It’s a journey [...] I met people from different districts and you share similarities but you also build on your differences and you try to see what can help.”

Crystel says she wants to see the initiative continue to grow with the support of Youth CI: “I hope to see BYSSI as not just a program that’s in select spaces, but as the go-to program for Black youth who want to achieve educational excellence and really just helping them get into that space where they’re set up, they’re ready to go, and they feel confident in their choice.”

The groups achieved real progress: Ontario placed a moratorium on youth aging out of care—the first province to do so. That means a young person can’t be made to leave their foster home at 18 and cannot be forced out of care for good at 21. With further lobbying, the moratorium has been extended twice and is in place until September 2022.

This period opens the door for more permanent policy change. Irwin is advising and supporting OCAC and YICC as they co-design with government a replacement system to “aging out” where young people in care will leave their homes or the system when they feel ready. Readiness markers will be determined in consultation with youth and could include indicators such as a young person having graduated from high school and having stable, supportive personal relationships in their life.

Importantly, this new system would place the onus on the government to consider how to support a young person from the moment they enter care in developing the positive, permanent relationships they need to live independent and fulfilling lives. Irwin sees this as something that could finally lead to a fundamental shift in how child welfare does its job. Young people involved call it an “ethical reset.”

These supporting and convening roles are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Irwin’s work as a Laidlaw Fellow. He has also been working to reform Ontario’s child death review system, advise various youth-led organizations and campaigns, and influence policy and legislative reform alongside young people

“What I’ve done at Laidlaw is continue to use any political capital I might have and the positional authority of a Fellowship: resources, access to decision makers, and knowledge around organizations to partner with mostly First Voice groups and support them to make sure their voices are heard,” says Irwin. “Laidlaw has been really effective at walking alongside these young people, and it will be crucial for the Foundation to continue that.”

*First Voice advocates are people who, as children and youth, are or were marginalized from their rights. This includes current and former young people in the child welfare system.

Family members are encouraged to consider the Mission of the Foundation when submitting their applications and to consider collaborating with other Family Members on co-funding applications involving grants from two or more Family Members. The Family Committee oversees the administration of the Fund and is comprised of the four Family Members on the Board, four other Family Members, and two non-Family Board Members. The Family Committee welcomed two new Family Members to the Committee in 2020, Tim Apgar and Julia Laidlaw, and one new non-Family Board Member, May Wong.

The Foundation saw many newer Family Members use the opportunity to grant the allocated funds in 2020. The year 2020 highlighted the amplified needs in communities due to COVID-19. Looking at the final amount of $152,451 granted and increased interest in the Fund, the trajectory of the Family Discretionary Grant Fund is headed in a good direction for the future. Lastly, due to public health restrictions, Family Members were unable to gather for any Family events but the Family Committee looks forward to organizing in-person events under the public health guidelines in the upcoming year

Salmon Coast Field Station Society:

$19,000

The funds will cover two projects: Firstly, $9900 will cover the entire remaining cost to start up their new Salmon Health Initiative: Innovative molecular and genomic tools offer unprecedented opportunities to monitor and assess the health of wild salmon. They are exploring the application of these tools to understand the stressors encountered by wild Pacific salmon--both juvenile salmon as they make their way to the open ocean, and adults as they return to spawn. The remaining funds of $14,000 will support their dock replacement initiative: A dock is the most crucial piece of infrastructure for a remote field station conducting marine research. It serves the station to achieve their conservation, education, and research goals, and they could not operate without one. Replacing the dock will support all the work done at the Salmon Coast, including the new Salmon Health Initiative and the continued sea lice monitoring program which is entering its 20th season. The dock will also serve their ongoing education and training programs that amplify public support and understanding of salmon in the region. Their existing dock must be replaced in the coming year.

An additional $4,000 was also donated to Salmon Coast Field Station Society from Cameron Laidlaw’s Board Discretionary Fund.

Family Members who contributed:

Cameron Laidlaw / Connor Laidlaw / Bill Laidlaw / Caitlin Laidlaw

Community Food Centres Canada:

$10,000

Community Food Centres provides vital services to 183 Good Food Organizations across the country. They support local efforts to mitigate food insecurity which has become especially critical with the pandemic which is putting unprecedented stress on already over stretched organizations. This brilliant organization is led by Nick Saul whose leadership was just recognized by the Order of Canada. The organization was nurtured by the invaluable Metcalf Foundation and was initially chaired by its CEO and President. The Board is full of extremely well qualified people. This is one of Canada’s finest charities with a role that could not be more obvious dealing with an unprecedented crisis. The Funds will provide food delivery to some of the most vulnerable Canadians at a time of great need.

Family Members who contributed:

Julia Laidlaw  / Jessica Hammell / Jamie Laidlaw / Katheryn Simmers / Jen Apgar / Caitlin Laidlaw / Ben Apgar / Jon Apgar / Chris Apgar / Tim Apgar

BC Parks Foundation:

$17,000

The funds would be used to support a program that provides Canadian newcomers free trips to regional BC Parks to experience guided or interpretive activities in outdoor spaces. Many newcomers to Canada reside in dense urban spaces and lack the means and the opportunities to get out of the city and into natural spaces. BCPF will allocate the funds to the Healthy By Nature program to work directly with Mosaic in Vancouver to cover the costs of between 5-10 bus trips to regional parks for Canadian newcomers. It would pay for transportation, guides/interpreters, and potentially outdoor gear (and/or PPE if trips undertaken while COVID protocols are in place). Between 250 - 400 individuals would participate in the trips. Mosaic and BCPF have piloted similar trips in the past and felt the trips made a lasting impact on the participants’ well-being and their connection with natural spaces.

Family Members who contributed:

Jon Apgar / Jen Apgar / Chris Apgar / Tim Apgar

HIV/AIDS Regional Services:

$13,000

HIV/AIDS Regional Services is a leader in providing service user advocacy and innovative, high quality services for people living with, at risk of, or affected by HIV/AIDS. The Fund will support the The Integrated Care Hub which provides support to the community’s most vulnerable populations. They provide harm reduction supplies, shelter, hygiene products, and food.

Family Members who contributed:

Jessica Hammell / Katheryn Simmers / Julia Laidlaw