A queer Kenyan refugee with getting housing
Donation protected
I'm raising funds on behalf of Liz (not including her photo here for privacy/dignity purposes). Liz is a refugee from Kenya in her late 30s, and she was one of the refugees sleeping outside at 129 Peter for a month when she first arrived.
Right now, she's looking at doing schooling during the day and working night shifts while also balancing being unhoused. I am raising $5000 for her. Your donation will directly support:
- Helping her get out of the 24 hour emergency respite center she's in
- Finding and putting down first and last on a stable, safe, peaceful place
- Top up the $600 she will eventually receive from Ontario Works
- Helping her get least a bed for when the right place comes up
- General moving/living expenses
- Support her with food while she starts schooling in November (She has to cover that herself while on Ontario works).
Liz left Kenya due to life threatening LGBTQ law changes. Uganda recently implemented the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality," and Kenya currently is tabling a similar bill (currently, it is punishable by 21 years in prison).
Please read this.
Earlier this summer, due to a funding disagreement between the municipal and federal government, hundreds of refugees (almost exclusively from the African continent, almost all of them Black, and many of them LGBTQ), sought safe refuge here on Canada's invitation and promise of protecting their minority rights. Upon arrival, these people - which included entire families, pregnant women, children - were abandoned to the sidewalks of Toronto, turned away from the shelter system (on council orders made under John Tory), for over a month. This is still happening as winter approaches.
Liz was one of these people. She, like the others, slept outside for almost a month in the rain, the brutal heat of Toronto summer, and the smoke.
We met in the chaos of what was going on at 129 Peter (I was involved in this mutual aid effort in a supportive capacity), and then reconnected again in a public library, where I found her struggling with the printer system to get her resume printed off.
Liz is a driven, thankful, optimistic, gentle person. She wants to start working either in her old area - finance - or make a switch to assisting the elderly (a role desperately needed in Canada, due to our undervaluing of critical care labour).
There are many barriers to her achieving these modest goals.
Being unhoused and a refugee in Canada is an impossible position: at the extreme intersection of both falling through the cracks of this system, and also totally beholden to it.
Like the others, she left everything - a job, a home, a family - to pursue the promise of a new life that Canada advertises on the world stage.
Individual support is no true substitute for the level of systemic failure - of all three levels of Canadian government - these people have faced. But if we can collectively get one person's foot in the door of an impossible system, it's something.
Please consider supporting Liz by donating to this GoFundMe.
If you're in a position to take in one of these refugees/asylum seekers, you can sign up to be a host here:
Thank you.
Organizer
Mary King
Organizer
Toronto, ON