Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue). Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.
This Sunday our featured speaker, Josephine Grey, will introduce the Basic Income concept in the context of climate change, and spark a discussion about how to build a better future.
Josephine Grey has been a human rights advocate, community organizer and public speaker for more than 30 years. In 1986 she co-founded Low Income Families Together (LIFT) in Toronto, a resource center run by and for low-income people. LIFT does community education on human rights, economic and political literacy, incubates community projects and helps provide a voice for low-income people. Josephine was a founding director and co-chair of Foodshare, 1988 to 1994 and a Founding Director of the Center for Social Justice, The Income Security Advocacy Centre, and the St. James Town Community Co-operative. She also helped build the first permanent housing for survivors of domestic abuse, Project Esperance.
In 1995 Josephine was appointed Canada’s Official Observer for domestic issues to the UN World Summit on Social Development. She then coordinated, authored and presented the Ontario People’s Report to the UN committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR) in 1998, a report on Civil and Political Rights in 1999, and another on ESCR in 2006. She served as the International Secretary for the National Anti-Poverty Organization (NAPO) and liaison to the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a network of over 300 national organizations that challenged and helped defeat the FTAA. Her work has taken her to 7 continents and many world summits and social forums.
Currently, she is engaged in mentoring youth empowerment and climate change resilience projects, and advocating for a rights-based guaranteed basic income. She helped organize and present to the North American Basic Income Conference (Hamilton, May 2018) as a member of the Basic Income Canada Network, and Basic Income Toronto. She is developing a healthy food and water security project in St James Town including climate resilient urban agriculture: the OASIS project, and several related social enterprise co-operatives. Josephine is a widowed single parent of 4, a grandmother, and a social housing tenant. She is dedicated to cultivating human rights-based solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges: extreme inequality, non-sustainability, and climate chaos.
Our featured musical performance will be robertalanfuturehearts – a music and poetry performance by Robert Alan Mackie dedicated to exploring the disposition of our words, the danceability of the rhythm of speech, and the human qualities of the instruments we use to make music. The stories of robertalanfuturehearts dissect specimens of the deeply unsettling and the cosmically whimsical, while the musical compositions make earworms of the abstract spaces no words can inhabit. Equal parts Alan Ginsberg and Andy Kaufman; equal parts traditional Norwegian village music and modern American free improvisation; a hint of Gestalt therapy and the suggestion of early 2000’s horror films – robertalanfuturehearts is a celebration spoken and sung of all the things we forget to talk about and a commitment to cultivating hope from whence we excavate melancholy. Here’s a link to this musical act: https://vimeo.com/user78493541
You can RSVP for this on our Meetup page at https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/254367771/
Green Zone Living is a self-help program based on a philosophy that inspires human beings to decrease emotional and social suffering and create a healthy, happy and peaceful lifestyle.
No stranger to our Toronto Oasis stage, our featured musician will be Erik Bleich! Erik is a singer songwriter whose genre blends classic pop and folk traditions – from street lit lullabies to manic, rambling romps.
For our musical performance this Sunday, we are so happy to have our own Cassie Norton!
This Sunday our featured speaker Dan Cooperstock will present material from Tim Crane‘s very interesting book with this title. Tim Crane is an atheist professor of philosophy. Dan learned about the book from a review in one of the Skeptic magazines he reads. The presentation will use a PowerPoint kindly given to Dan by the author. The following paragraph is also partly adapted from the book’s liner notes.
Our featured musician will be Erika Werry. Erika Werry is a band leader, singer, songwriter and has a background in classical and modern dance. Her song material is inspired by travels and day-to-day experience, and through a love of classic French and English literature. Erika brings deeply personal, uncompromising and new perspectives to the age-old themes of life and love. The songs are short and fun, often with tongue-in-cheek lyrical humour and sometimes with devastatingly poignant lyrics on relationships. A consummate performer, Erika sings and dances through her fast-paced sets. Her songs are delivered with her signature vocals, in a “… lovely… grainy alto”, and The Alphabet, her band, delivers razor sharp accompaniment to her lyrical melodies. Her website is 
Steven is a life long construction professional who entered the industry at age 15, received construction training at George Brown College and was in a hurry to apply his skills, especially in non-profit work. He has worked in the trades and in management and now works in litigation as a construction claims consultant.
Our featured musician will be Emilyn Stam. Emilyn is a Toronto-based fiddler, pianist and accordionist who creates, performs, records and teaches in folk, trad, and neo-trad styles from Europe and Canada. She has 4 Canadian Folk Music Award Nominations, (The Shoeless, Eh?!, Lemon Bucket Orkestra) and 2 Juno Award Nominations (Lemon Bucket Orkestra). For more on our musical performer, please check out her website 
Catherine holds Bachelor of Arts (1981) and Bachelor of Law (1985) degrees from the University of Toronto and was called to the Ontario Bar in 1987. Catherine is a long-time partner at Minden Gross LLP, a mid-sized downtown Toronto law firm, practicing principally in the areas of commercial and insolvency litigation. Catherine was raised in a secular household with a strong belief in equality rights and is keenly interested in legal issues affecting the interests of non-believers and the separation of Church and State. Her website is: 
Originally hailing from the industrial landscape of Hamilton, Ontario, Dana Sipos inhabited the far Canadian north – Yellowknife, Northwest Territories – for many years before going nomad. Her captivatingly nuanced songs continue to be infused with a wild wind and a haunting, slightly hypnotic surrealism akin to the mysteries of the North. Her 2015 release, Roll Up the Night Sky, was nominated for a Canadian folk music award in the Pushing the Boundaries category celebrating innovation in creating new folk sounds. She has a new album, Trick of the Light, released earlier this year, in spring 2018.
For this long-weekend Sunday, join us for a potluck lunch! Come share your food, stories, experiences and insights!
David Burman is a graduate of the Faculty of Dentistry and PhD in community health from U of T. He has spent several years working in Cree communities along the coast of James Bay. His interests include indigenous environmental issues, spirituality, and the social determinants of health. David has been active in the peace and environmental movements for over 40 years. He was a candidate for the Green Party in 4 elections, and helped start Toronto’s first local currency system (LETS). He is an active member of Ecologos and Transition Toronto and has served on the boards of directors of ICA Canada, a community development organization, the Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition and Science for Peace.
For our musical performance, we will have The Spanish Waiter, a guitar/violin duo featuring Mike Hopkins and his musical partner. Mike Hopkins, B.F.A., has studied Classical guitar for twenty years. In that time, he has performed a repertoire ranging from the Renaissance to contemporary pieces.