Five Good Ideas for racial justice change-making

In this session, originally recorded on March 25, 2021, we asked Lesa Francis, Avvy Go, Samya Hasan and Shalini Konanur to share five good ideas for racial justice change-making.

How do we best address growing colour-coded inequality – for Indigenous peoples and peoples of colour, including Black Canadians? What are the institutional, structural, and systemic impacts of racism, faithism, and related inequality in education, housing, justice, health, and employment? How can individuals, groups, and organizations engage in effective trust-building, ally-ship, partnership development, and advocacy – to build on our successes, maintain hard-won gains, and bring about needed change? By highlighting examples of the real economic, health, and social impacts of racism and faithism, Lesa Francis, Avvy Go, Samya Hasan, and Shalini Konanur break down five good ideas for better “walking the talk” on racial equity and delivering more effectively on racial justice in Ontario.

This Five Good Ideas session was organized in partnership with Colour of Poverty – Colour of Change.

Five Good Ideas

1. Collect disaggregated race-based (and other socio-demographic) data.
2. Incorporate a racial equity and racial justice lens in the development and evaluation of policies, budgets, programs, practices, and cultures – both internally and externally.
3. Adopt an intersectional approach to your anti-racism and racial equity and racial justice work and apply it in the hiring and promotion of staff, as well as in the recruitment of board members.
4. Build effective ally-ship among and across peoples of colour, Indigenous Peoples, and others, as it is critical in the promotion of racial equity and racial justice in all of our partnership building and advocacy, within and across organizations, communities, and society.
5. Lobby governments for systems level changes that promote racial equity and racial justice, and build internal organizational capacity to actively advocate for and support such change-making efforts.

Resources

• Colour of Poverty Fact Sheets (2019)
• Count Me In – Collecting Human Rights Based Data (OHRC) 
• COP-COC Disaggregated Data Collection Survey Tool-Template
• Measuring Health Equity – Demographic Data Collection in Health Care
• Employment Equity 101 (COP-COC)

For the full transcript, visit https://maytree.com/five-good-ideas/five-good-ideas-for-racial-justice-change-making/

About the presenters

Lesa Francis
At the date of the Five Good Ideas session (March 25, 2021), Lesa Francis was the Interim Executive Director at the Black Legal Action Centre, a specialty legal aid clinic in Ontario that works to develop access to justice and combat individual and systemic anti-Black racism.

Avvy Go
At the date of the Five Good Ideas session (March 25, 2021), Avvy Go was the Clinic Director of the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic and a founding steering committee member of Colour of Poverty – Colour of Change.

Samya Hasan
Executive Director, Council of Agencies Serving South Asians
Samya Hasan has been working with the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA) since 2015 in different capacities including as a Project Coordinator and Project Manager; she has been the Executive Director of CASSA since 2017.

Shalini Konanur
Executive Director, South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario
Shalini Konanur is the Executive Director and a lawyer at the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (SALCO). She has worked in Ontario’s legal aid clinic for the past 20 years and is actively involved in several areas of poverty law reform.