Hi all!

My name is Atreyu Lewis, and I am the founder of Rising from our Roots. This grassroots organization is committed to distributing resources to marginalized youth and creating spaces for community mobilization in marginalized communities. Our team comprises honorarium-paid and volunteer youth community members who are BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and disabled persons residing in Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec.

Rising from our Roots has hosted community solidarity events like the BIPOC Queer Trans and Community Wellness Market. We are soon to be launching more platforms for resources and community programming! We will soon be providing other services such as nature-based programming, youth consultations, resource guides, workshops and more community engagement that promotes intersectionality, harm reduction and healing justice frameworks to youth. We allocate funds raised at events towards organizations such as Black Healing Fund, Project 10, Resilience Montreal and more that provide essential resources and outreach to Queer, Trans Disabled Black, Indigenous and Persons of colour.

We are looking to raise funds to continue our work in peer support, solidarity with the unhoused, creating intersectional and accessible event spaces and expanding our outreach and services to other areas of climate and racial justice. These new services will include promoting traditional ecological knowledge, care package-making workshops, cultural revitalization programs in remote Indigenous communities, holistic wellness training and more. These practices will improve the quality of life for marginalized persons, help youth reclaim agency, and connect with other marginalized youth to practice coalition building.

Funds raised here will go towards creating care packages for marginalized youth, paying team members to develop resource guides, making a promotional video explaining our goals, setting up resource drop-offs for vulnerable populations and setting up a shared library. We also want to host harm reduction and crisis intervention training as rent continues to skyrocket and more people are displaced under the settler capitalist colonial system present in so-called Canada. In the spring season, we also want to run hiking and planting activities that help youth learn food sovereignty skills. In contributing to mutual aid, one of our goals is to set up a survival fund for persons in need of emergency living costs to gain the funds needed for survival. Our mission as an organization is to provide the necessary support to bring marginalized youth together in a safe space for networking and to share their creative outlets.

Support our organization by sending funds to grow our outreach and mobilization budget : ). You can also support us by following our Instagram page at @risingfromourroots and volunteering for events!