What do the housing, health care, and climate crises have in common? Lots, it turns out, including the fact that they’re all being driven by the ultra-rich and corporate actors who value profit over collective community well-being. On May 13th, For Our Kids Nova Scotia joined together with housing, health care and workers’ rights advocates to explore how we can work together to push back against this corporate agenda and instead build back our grassroots power to create a stronger, more equitable future with sustainable communities where we all thrive.
The “Many vs the Money” Town Hall in Antigonish brought together close to 75 members of the community for a panel presentation with myself representing For Our Kids and the Antigonish Coalition to End Poverty, Jennifer Benoit from the Nova Scotia Community Health Coalition, Speireag Hendra from A Roof Over your Head, and Mary Desmond, Councilor in the Municipality of Guysborough and housing and health advocate. I shared how, as a mom, my greatest hope is to have a better world for my kids to grow up in, and how creating community based solutions to these intersecting crises will help bring that world into being. This means investing in good green and low-carbon jobs, like care work, and clean, renewable, and community-controlled energy sources. It also means fighting back against fracking and uranium mining as false solutions that will only put our communities at greater risk. Other panelists shared about the importance of protecting our public health care system from privatization, the reality and impacts of homelessness and housing precarity in rural and small communities (made worse by climate change), and the importance of honoring and including lived experience from those most impacted.
After the panel presentations, we broke out into small groups for “kitchen-table” talks where we had a chance to discuss how the issues discussed are showing up in our lives, and what actions we can take in our community. This was followed by a “barnstorm” where people were able to pitch an action and others could sign up to get involved. For Our Kids supporters in Antigonish are planning to participate in the youth-led “People’s Parade for Life on Earth” in June!
It was a powerful evening that encouraged us to think and connect outside our “silos” and to rediscover our community power in the face of these crises which sometimes feel so big and overwhelming. For me, it was a reminder of our power as “the many” and how meaningful community-based conversations and solutions can be.
If you’re based in Atlantic Canada and interested in taking action to stop fracking and expanding oil and gas projects, please see this call to action from event organizers Sierra Club of Canada, and please feel free to get in touch with us at [email protected] to get involved with For Our Kids’ growing network in Nova Scotia!
By Wyanne Sandler, For Our Kids Nova Scotia
