Local Hope and Challenges

Both Don Iveson and Lisa Helps were elected as mayor on progressive and environmental platforms. This session will engage them in conversation about their successes and challenges during their respective terms, reflections since leaving office, and the “from the ground up” organizing and advocacy work they are each doing today on many of the same issues they initially ran on.

Don Iveson, former Mayor of Edmonton

After 14 years of elected public service at Edmonton City Hall, including five years as Chair of Canada’s Big City Mayors, Don Iveson founded Civic Good in 2021, providing advice on climate resilience, housing affordability, civic innovation and adaptive governance. He is primarily engaged with Co-operators as Executive Advisor to the Resilience Acceleration Lab, developing and investing in climate adaptation projects in communities across Canada. Don also serves as Co-Chair of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, and Chair of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). He remains based in Edmonton but works with governments, startups and not-for-profits across Canada in areas ranging from cleantech to modular housing.

Lisa Helps, former Mayor of Victoria

Lisa Helps is currently Executive Lead, Project Acceleration at BC Housing. Prior to this, as Executive Lead BC Builds Project Origination, she co-led the development and implementation of BC Builds, a housing funding, financing and acceleration program and served as Housing Solutions Advisor to British Columbia Premier Eby. Lisa was also two-term Mayor of Victoria, British Columbia, where she worked hard to create deep collaboration across the community to get Victoria ready for the future.

Academia, Advocacy, Activism and the Spaces in Between: Reflections on the Struggle for Housing Justice in Edmonton

Joshua Evans, Associate Professor, University of Alberta

Housing justice is elusive because it requires both the alleviation of everyday suffering and the achievement of systemic social change. Oftentimes, as one comes into focus, we can lose sight of the other. In this presentation, Joshua will address this “tunnel-vision trap” by reflecting on the struggle for housing justice in Edmonton. Working from the standpoint of academic research, policy advocacy and housing activism, Joshua will explore ways we might be able to move beyond simply repairing the safety net towards the creation of a just housing system. 

Joshua Evans is Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Alberta. Joshua’s research focuses on housing, homelessness and mental health recovery.

Organizing for Our Lives: How ACORN Builds Tenant Power in Alberta

Calgary ACORN - Linda Johnson and Kyla Szustaczek

ACORN’s grassroots organizing model is building tenant power in Alberta, one of the most hostile places for tenants in Canada. We’ll discuss the issues Alberta tenants face, including fixed-term lease abuse, rent hikes, and substandard housing conditions, alongside the concrete wins we’ve achieved through collective and direct action. ACORN organizes for fundamental systemic change and works within existing systems to win tangible improvements in tenants’ lives today.

Calgary ACORN is a grassroots, membership-based community union of low- and moderate-income people fighting for social and economic justice. Through door-knocking, chapter meetings, direct actions, and issue-based campaigns, ACORN organizes to win concrete change for today, and create lasting systemic change for tomorrow. 

Humanities 101

Lisa Prins, University of Alberta

Humanities 101 is a University of Alberta supported program that provides free, collaborative adult education that celebrates multiple ways of knowing. Courses bring together adults who face complex barriers to accessing post-secondary. Together we learn, as a community, across difference, generating new knowledge and practicing the world we want to live in – an equitable world where all people thrive in imagination and possibility.

This presentation will think through the need and want for access to collaborative adult education as a practice of respecting the lived experiences of those living within poverty as active knowledge that is change making. The presentation will discuss the difficulties and simplicities of facilitating Humanities 101 classrooms.

This presentation is informed by the following thought from Elana Eisen-Markowitz and Rachel Schragis: “We believe accepting multiple truths is part of the process of changing behaviors and systems, and are troubled when people who benefit from those systems use complexity as a reason to defer action.” 

Lisa Prins is the Manager, Adult and Community Education with Community Service-Learning and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is grateful for the opportunities this role provides her to collaborate with people from across campus and amiskwaciy to develop strength-based courses where people engage in collective learning across difference. Lisa is committed to challenging colonial understandings of who is a learner and who is a knower. Her work centres relationships, building possibility, and play.

Minal Patel, We're Together Ending Poverty, Calgary 

It's the Same Fight

Marcia Howard, Minneapolis

Marcia Howard, steward at George Floyd Square and Teacher Chapter President of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Local 59, will speak about the legacy of resistance in Minneapolis—from the uprising after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, to solidarity built across the labor movement and grassroots organizations, to a historic educators' strike in 2022 and the subsequent fights for even better contracts, to the struggle against ICE occupation during Operation Metro Surge. Across all of these historical moments, her message is the same: all of our fights are connected.

Marcia Howard is an English teacher at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, MN, where she has taught since 1998. She has been one of the key leaders in the George Floyd Square occupation and is currently the President of the teacher chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Local 59.

Debriefing the Referendum

One month after Alberta’s referendum, what has changed? This session will discuss the referendum results and the implications for policy, democracy, and rights in Alberta going forward. It will also explore the campaigning that happened across the political spectrum around the referendum, including the different campaign focuses, how they worked to engage and mobilize different sectors of the population, how Albertans responded, and the future prospects for organizing and mobilizing in Alberta.

Jared Wesley, Professor, University of Alberta

Jared Wesley is Associate Dean (Education), Co-Director of the Peter Lougheed School of Politics and Democracy, a professor of political science, and member of the Black Faculty Collective at the University of Alberta. He studies the links between public opinion, public policy, and political culture.

Brad Lafortune, Public Interest Alberta

Brad Lafortune is the Executive Director of Public Interest Alberta. Born and raised on the prairies, he has spent the last 20 years in Edmonton. In the past, Bradley has worked with community organizations, labour unions, and advised leaders and politicians from all levels of government. His favourite part of advocacy is working with good people helping make big change happen.

No Secret Recipe

Deena Ladd (Toronto Workers Action Centre)

We are organizing in challenging times. The relentless assault on all the things we care about are under attack. The shock doctrine is having an impact on us. We are running from one issue to the next. Spinning from the world wide crisis to the personal and community crisis of the impact of the right wing vicious agenda.

There are no easy answers and no secret recipe. However, there are intentional strategies we can pursue to build power and to expose the choices that politicians are making to choose profit and war over our communities.

Deena Ladd is one of the founders and Executive Director of Toronto’s Workers’ Action Centre. The Workers’ Action Centre organizes to improve wages and working conditions with low-waged workers, women, racialized and immigrant workers in precarious jobs that face discrimination, violations of rights and no benefits in the workplace.