Support the Fight for Unhoused Liberation

WHO WE ARE:

For the last two years, Voices 4 Unhoused Liberation has been building collective power organizing with the unhoused and underhoused community in shelters, hotels, and encampments in order to confront the City of Toronto's war on the poor demand freedom and liberation for poor and unhoused people.

Currently, Voices is a 100% volunteer-run grassroots group with shared lived experience with poverty, homelessness, and precarious housing.

Voices is an anti-authoritarian, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist group that's fighting systems of oppression including racism, sexism, ablism, transphobia and poor bashing. Voices recognizes that disability is a main experience of unhoused community members. We know that people in our community experience many of these oppressions at once. We are committed to abolishing all carceral institutions that contain, control and punish poor and unhoused people, including the shelter system.

As frontline organizers, we are inspired by marxist ideas and the survival programs and politics of groups like the Black Panthers. We believe in Land Back and the redistribution of resources throughout society. Voices supports choice, autonomy, agency, and sovereignty for unhoused people in their lives including in the services that they engage with. Everyone deserves housing, adequate income, dignity and respect. Everyone deserves to participate in political life on issues that impact them.

WHAT WE DO:

Change happens by community building with unhoused people. Voices does weekly outreach at shelters and encampments in order to understand unhoused experiences, create community oversight on the shelter system, and represent their issues. We hand out coffee and snacks, conduct know-your-rights training, distribute literature, do case-work, and bring camping gear, harm reduction supplies, and other necessities as people need.

We meet and organize with shelter and encampment residents to develop analysis, establish clear goals, and build collective strategy. We do public education, while connecting and nurturing allies to build our base towards direct action and mass mobilization. Voices uses the power we build to challenge power in the city by being loud and disruptive, on the offense instead of being reactive.

CURRENT CAMPAIGN:

Since Voices formed, we have spent the majority of our time supporting residents who face eviction from their shelter homes. We fight against the harmful shelter practice of 'service restriction,' which force people from their beds to the streets with little due process. At encampments, we fight against encampment clearings, as well as the coercion and threats used to make people leave.

Our No Homeless Evictions!! campaign is calling for a full moratorium on service restrictions and encampment clearings. We are demanding that our community leads the development of all plans, strategies, and policies regarding homelessness that are made by the City of Toronto.

OUR ASK:

We are raising $17,156 to cover our expenses for the next full year. Here's the financial breakdown:

If we surpass our fundraising goal, extra funds will go towards the following: