Highlights from the Forum

It’s a bit hard for me to believe that the Canadian Social Forum began exactly a week ago today. I’ve now been back in the office for almost two days, and I feel like I’ve only begun to process all that I saw, heard and experienced in Calgary.

Attending the Forum was an intense and enriching experience. The speakers, workshops and conversations that were packed into four days have left me with much to reflect upon.

A high point of the week was having the opportunity to present my poster on childcare and women’s equality. I was very happy to be able to share my work on early childhood education and care and I had a number of good discussions with other Forum participants about it.

Another highlight of the week was having the opportunity to hear Uzma Shakir and Cindy Blackstock speak on Wednesday afternoon. Both women offered eloquent and passionate perspectives of the poverty experienced by marginalized communities in Canada. Uzma, who I saw speak last month at the Rethinking Poverty 2 Forum, spoke of the racialization of poverty in Canada and urged for greater dialogue and transformative action regarding race and poverty.

Cindy Blackstock, the Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, then gave a powerful presentation on Aboriginal poverty in Canada and the shameful lack of government investment in Aboriginal communities. Both speakers made me think a lot more critically about how our society has been historically shaped by concepts of race, and how barriers to opportunities are still often constructed along racial lines.

I also found it helpful that the Forum juxtaposed academic –style workshops about poverty with speakers who shared their lived experiences of the issues being discussed. I left the Forum with the desire to hear more personal perspectives of poverty, as I found it helped clarify and humanize the injustice of it.

I was very glad to have been able to participate in such an exciting, dynamic event as the Forum, and I’ll be writing more about it shortly. Stay tuned for more reflections in the next few days!