Thank you to the National Association of Friendship Centres for having me as one of their keynote speakers for their youth conference this year in Enoch, Alberta! Check out a couple of photos, my presentation and a few links I referenced in my presentation.

I've seen immense progress in the past year within many places and people I have strong relationships with. But we need everyone to help if we're gonna make reconciliation and a good life for all a reality. I suggest that we start at the beginning, at call to action #1, do what we can to support parents and bring the children home.

So I was thinking some deep thoughts when I was shoveling yesterday. When I was shoulder deep in snow, I realized that shoveling in snow storms was a great metaphor for life and the choices we can make.

“In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.” This quote from Angela Y. Davis kept coming up as I worked with educators this week who were learning about how to address systemic racism within schools and communities.

All this information is overwhelming especially as many systems seem to go on pause over the holiday time. It is odd because it is also a time when many people feel we need our systems to be operating at an increased capacity the opposite is happening. So how do we respond when it feels like we have already been responding to the maximum of our abilities over the last 2 years?

This is a very important topic and touches very close to home for me as many of the young people I work with are this very demographic. Many will know from my public talks that I have had many personal encounters with suicide and that ongoing tragedy is why I work as hard as I do to create hope and change systems. Please read the full report & music video released today from the Manitoba Advocate for Children & Youth.

Resiliency is a term used to describe individuals who are tough or have the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. But the way it is often used in academics and media is so problematic that I share my belief that when we only focus on how strong people are, we ignore the many challenges they should never have had to overcome in the first place!

The “Let Our Relatives In” campaign has 4 main ideas to support our relatives who sleep outside in Winnipeg. It involves increasing Indigenous representation in leadership, organization responses to calls to action/calls for justice, partnering with Thunderbird House & taking a healing centred and anti-racist approach to service delivery.

We need everyone / this is re-sharing of a post published back in May 2016