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/