The West Toronto Ontario Health Team’s Commitment to Anti-Black Racism
February is Black History Month – a time of celebration, as we remember and honour the achievements and contributions of Black people. While a valuable time to show support, the West Toronto Ontario Health Team (WTOHT) understands that supporting our Black communities is an ongoing and year-round commitment that requires a sustained effort.
In Toronto, Black Canadians often experience ‘service deserts’ – a lack of safe, inexpensive and effective healthcare and community services in their area.
In 2022, to kick-start our health equity work, the West Toronto OHT began collaboration with the Mississauga OHT to address anti-Black Racism (ABR) by creating new opportunities for our partners through an ABR organizational self-assessment survey. The survey was designed to support health and social service organizations with identifying their current state, capacity, individual experiences of staff and opportunities to meaningfully address ABR. The survey allowed us to:
Understand where individual organizations are with respect to addressing ABR
Foster a more informed staff and organizational culture that is supportive, inclusive, and accountable
Strengthen capacity to engage and collaborate on initiatives that dismantle systemic racism
Support the advancement of health equity
To further address anti-Black Racism, both the West Toronto and Mississauga OHTs have pooled resources to establish an anti-Black Racism Working Group. With renewed funding coming in 2023-24, the Working Group is set to move forward with their action plan that aims to build more awareness, capacity and cooperation with local resources to eliminate ABR and provide better health and social care for Black residents closer to home.
Leading the way: LAMP CHC
The organizational self-assessment survey created by the West Toronto OHT and Mississauga OHT stems from previous work established by LAMP Community Health Centre. LAMP is one of the WTOHT’s partner organizations and is leading the way when it comes to ABR work. LAMP’s underlying mandate has always been to combat oppressive practices and it has done so through mandatory staff training to help their team address the many barriers to care that their clients may face.
With focus primarily on tackling anti-Indigenous and anti-Black Racism, efforts to address these needs were propelled forward in 2020 following the backdrop of COVID-19 and its disproportionate impact on Black communities. Adding to this, the pain their community, clients and staff faced following the death of George Floyd, along with similar instances here in Toronto, and the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States pushed them to start a series of iterative organizational-wide assessment surveys.
Understanding that education is a starting point and with funding from the WTOHT, LAMP partnered with Karen Arthurton, an instructor from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) for an extensive training series for staff. Not wanting something that simply ‘checks the box,’ the training series comprises of six three-hour sessions.
Further stemming from their surveys, LAMP has been working on an ABR policy which they intend on debuting at the end of this month. They also intend to make the policy mobile, allowing other organizations to adopt it into their own structure.
Internally, the organization supports their teams in fostering an anti-oppressive culture through their own work plans. Staff already hold discussions every other month to share learnings and also share them by email so colleagues can interact with the material.
If you want to learn more about LAMP’s commitment to disrupting the cycle of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism across their organization and network, head to www.lampchc.org and view their 2021-2022 Annual Report.