Black and Indigenous Lives Matter

From our earliest days as an organization, our nurses have been treating, bandaging, and documenting the wounds left on our friends by police officers and private security guards. Our Black and Indigenous friends have been disproportionately the bearers of the burden of this systemic violence. We stand with them today, as we have for the last 28 years, saying that their lives matter. Black lives matter. Indigenous lives matter. Black and Indigenous homeless lives matter. Black and Indigenous LGBTQ lives matter.

We are grateful to have you in our community, while we are outraged by the consistency of violence from the authorities towards you. We seek a city where a 911 call could bring a trained mental health worker, or a housing worker, or access to harm reduction or other addiction services. We seek a city where every call for an ambulance doesn’t bring the risk of people with weapons arriving before the healthcare providers. We seek a city where more public resources have been put into early childhood interventions and trauma counselling than into policing people whose childhood trauma manifests itself in behaviours that seem odd, unusual, or frightening to strangers. We seek a city where violence is considered such a last resort, that it’s barely ever considered at all.

In the wake of the deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Caleb Tubila Njoko, D’Andre Campbell, and George Floyd, we are thankful for the advocates, protesters, researchers, and policy writers pushing hard to make us that sort of city. We commit to pray for you, learn from your work, and change through dialogue with you. We want to be continually growing as allies, co-conspirators, and advocates, and welcome being challenged to be better by BIPOC voices both within and outside of our community.