Mark PeckmezianThe Weston TowersI’d like to spend my five minutes sharing a few stories that have influenced the vision I want to put forward. One of the stories relates to a picture included in John Lorinc’s piece in this month’s Walrus. It begins inside the middle of the Weston Towers, the three monolithic buildings that are shown on page 28, where for ten years, my family built a home on the twenty-fourth floor after arriving from Ghana to Toronto in 1979. We joined a small but growing community of Ghanaians living there. It was an amazing childhood, and my brother, who is here today, will attest to that. At the time, whether we were part of the 25 percent of poor high-rise dwellers was certainly not a concern to me. My top priority was peering over our balcony to see if the neighbourhood kids were starting a game of soccer-baseball in the valley behind our buildings.
A decade later, something of a panic struck our community. All of a sudden, we were hearing about one family after another moving out of the building and into houses. Home ownership quickly became the line separating those who had “made it” and those who did not. And the pressure was not just local. We began receiving phone calls from family back home asking if we had made it, like so and so’s family had made it.
My family, though not entirely prepared to do so, succumbed to the pressure and bought a house in North Etobicoke, Rexdale. I began the seventh grade in Elmbank Middle School, located near Jamestown Crescent, a neighbourhood that had been in the media often because of violence and drug-related activities. In the summer before high school began, I secured my first job working in Jamestown’s community garden, part of an effort initiated by the Thistletown Community Services Unit. Pierrette Forgie, the executive director of The Unit, as it was known then, had been a mainstay of the Jamestown community for more than twenty years by that point. She had seen waves of immigrants settle and eventually leave the neighbourhood. I’ll never forget her orientation session with me. She walked me around Jamestown Crescent, and every few steps she would tell me the story of a community and leaders within that community who worked together to address a need. I remember her telling me about the Somali women who were working to get a portable trailer in the area where they could share food and information about employment opportunities and the like. That memory brings me to my vision for Toronto as a model of city-building that comes from collective leadership.
Many of you will recognize this as part of the vision that David Pecaut challenged us all to see in his “love letter to Toronto,” written just before his passing in December 2009. In my five-and-a-half years of working with CivicAction, I’ve found this notion of city-building through collective leadership to be a vehicle for real change; incremental, yes, but real nonetheless. With that in mind, there are three things I would like to offer as precursors to fulfilling this vision across the Toronto region.
1. Recognize and address the participatory boundaries: City-building through collective leadership, as we’ve imagined it to date, is a privilege. Many of us involved in city-building initiatives are able to do so because we are working in an area that is highly connected to civic issues or because our day jobs provide sufficient support such that we can volunteer our time. Our work at CivicAction has brought to light the challenges people experience when trying to participate in these initiatives. One of our 2011 DiverseCity Fellows, Brandon Hay, who runs the Black Daddies Club, comes to mind. As a father and someone who is committed to city-building through the collective leadership of black fathers, Brandon runs the BDC primarily on a volunteer basis. All the while, he holds several other jobs. He has tried to overcome participatory boundaries through organizational partnerships and the support of several volunteers. But let’s imagine, for just one moment, the impact he could make if he was able to focus on the BDC instead of juggling it with piecemeal work, so much so that he risks being absent from his family life — the very thing he’s trying to work against. Ideally, participation in city-building life would be as easy for people like Brandon as it once was for me to participate in the life of our community at 3400 Weston Road.
2. Preserve our city-building histories: Stories have been called cognitive maps. They explain how things work, how we understand our place in the world and even how we create identities. While I didn’t know it at the time, hearing the stories of collective leadership in Jamestown did create something of a map for me. The Toronto Museum Project can do the same thing for our residents. Preserving our city-building histories means we can connect with one another and build attachments to our city. But, recalling my first point, we need to be intentional about casting the net wide. Stories like the Black Daddies Club, or of Toronto residents coming together to take a stand for the city services they treasure, or of the DiverseCity project, are all different forms of city-building, but they are all stories that can inspire others to find their place within it.
3. Write a new generation of leaders into that history: After taking me through Jamestown and telling me stories of various city-builders, Pierrette asked, “What contribution will people say you made?” She did something all great leaders do, and something that I have been blessed to have others, many of whom are in the room today, do for me time and time again: she cast a vision for me and built me into the story. I think this is an area where we still have a lot of work to do. While there are some places where the established city-building leadership and the emerging leadership are able to connect, we could do better overall. I’m very proud of the work of CivicAction’s Emerging Leaders Network, for example. We’ve been able to create a space for intergenerational collective leadership, where more established leaders can cast a vision for newer leaders. That work has also illuminated a need to create safe spaces for people to practice collective leadership. What I’ve heard from participants in the network is that there are few places in Toronto where one can be “intrapreneurial” — i.e., have the space to be entrepreneurial with something of a safety net to support you. They have benefitted from sage advice, the opening of doors, and in effect the “permission,” by virtue of their involvement in the network, to take the lead.
Imagine what our city would look and feel like if all of our residents felt like trustees of the city. If we all felt like we were part of a history of city-building through collective leadership, and that we were each written into that history. If we did, we would each see ourselves as the proverbial “they” who can address these issues we are talking about today. I challenge us all to look for real ways we can help break the participatory boundaries to city-building. Find ways to record and share the different kinds of city-building work we are doing, and write new leaders into our city-building histories.
Naki Osutei is the vice-president of strategy for the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance. She delivered these remarks on October 12, 2011 at Imagining Toronto: A City-Builders’ Symposium, which preceded The Walrus Toronto Project Debate at the AGO.
The Walrus HOOPP Pension Debate
Be It Resolved That Canadians Are Incapable
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12 pm, Wednesday, May 30 at
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Calgary’s Cowboy Culture:
Living Legacy or Just History?
6:30 pm, Thursday, June 7 at
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