Healthcare as a Workers Right

Join us for live performance and dialogue capturing responses to the alienating and increasingly inaccessible healthcare system in Ontario. Together, we will reflect on organizing tactics and celebrate community led supports. Dinner provided.

Panel discussion
Discussing the impacts of the privatization of health care on different communities, moderated by Emma Steen, the curator of Labour Pains.

Panelists: Angela Robertson (Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre), Simran Dhunna (Naujawan Support Network), Mskwaasin Agnew (Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction), Brad Evoy (Disability Justice Network)

Live Shadow Puppetry and Song
Singer-songwriter and folk musician Jesse Corrigan will perform a selection of labour songs and workers songs by Scottish musician Dick Gaughan to accompany a live shadow puppetry performance by Kristine White, an excerpt from her Mayworks Festival creation, What Is A Body Worth?, co-presented with Charles Street Video.

Catering by Masterchefman. All Mayworks Festival events are free.

Emma Steen is a Toronto based curator and writer. She received her BA at NSCAD University in Halifax, NS and then went on to complete a Masters of Art History at OCAD University in Toronto. Her area of interest lies in art and writing that explores intimacies, bodies, and gathering. Her background includes extensive work in community arts organizing, arts administration, and supporting methods of institutional accountability. As a curator, she has worked on multiple public art projects, with galleries, and in digital spaces. Growing up in Toronto’s downtown core has influenced her approach to curating and the importance of public art as a means of access to identity, placemaking, and feeling responsible, cared for and involved in the extended communities we are a part of.

Simran Dhunna is a member of Naujawan Support Network, and has previously organized on labour and climate justice in the Greater Toronto Area. She is in her 3rd year of medical school at Queen’s University.

Angela Robertson is the executive director of Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre. Parkdale Queen West is a community-based health service organization serving mid and west Toronto. Angela is dedicated to people and communities facing discrimination, poverty and marginalization and working to change those social conditions. She is a founding member of Blockorama, which focuses on forging spaces for Black and other racialized LGBTQ+ people and allies in Toronto’s Pride, and has served on numerous community Boards, including Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention, Houselink and the Stephen Lewis Foundation. Angela has been recognized for her social justice work by the YWCA, Fred Victor Centre, and Urban Alliance on Race Relations, NOW magazine and was honoured by York University in 2017 with an Honorary Doctorate of Laws degree for her social justice work. In response to the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on racialized and low-income populations, Angela initiated and co-chair a Black Health Equity Working Group of health sector experts, leaders, practitioners, and researchers concerned with improving the health and wellbeing of Black people. For her work she was recognized by the Alliance with the Denise Brooks Equity Champion Award and the Pillar of the Pandemic recognition award from the U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Mskwaasin, Anishnaabemowin for Redstone, is Dene and a band member of Salt River First Nation. She was traditionally adopted by Neyaashiinigmiing, formerly known as Cape Croker, located on the southern shores of Lake Huron. She has lived her entire life on Anishinaabek territory and dedicated herself to her various community’s she serves. Mskwaasin is a harm reduction worker with Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction and Streethealth. She is a proud abolitionist and anti capitalist, a foundation for her labor as an an organizer. She fights for a free Palestine, Land back, housing and people who use drugs. She love pow wows, being outside, fishing  and punk music.

Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction (TIHR) emerged in April 2020 during the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic in response to a massive shutdown of frontline services and a lack of basic needs for Indigenous houseless folks in the city of Toronto. Over the past year, we have provided basic needs, access to critical health support & covid 19 testing, harm reduction supplies, sexual, reproductive health and prenatal support, traditional medicines, traditional food, expressive arts, and ceremony to some of our most vulnerable people. TIHR aims to reduce the negative impacts of substance use and other stigmatized behaviours and experiences through culture and unconditional support. TIHR is an entirely queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous collective founded by Nanook Gordon, co-led by Brianna Olson Pitawanakwat and supported by Dashmaawaan Bemadzinjin (They feed the people) and countless volunteers.

Kristine White (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works across the mediums of shadow, light, live performance and digital media. Her work is always collaborative, and has been created in relationship with musicians, dancers, theatre-makers, academics, activists, plant and elemental life forces. Kristine’s interest in labour and art has roots in her early involvement in activist artmaking through puppetry and protest art. A focus in her current practise is reflection on the interdependence of modern selfhood, and the ways in which our systems of labour/production/consumption blur that interdependence to make (some of) us feel as though we are existing independently when in reality we are heavily dependant on the labour, bodies, and precarity of many others. Kristine’s project with USWs Injured Workers Program will ask questions about what bodies are “worth” in a system that monetizes not only labour but the myriad nuanced capacities of the body itself.

Jesse Corrigan is a folk musician and singer-songwriter based in Grey County, Ontario. Jesse began playing the guitar at the age of 10 when his mom taught him the chords for “Amazing Grace”. He has always been drawn to the narrative style of folk music and incorporates this into his own songwriting, often adding a touch of humour and lyrical wit.