GVAT Newsletter: Pocket Park Win, Housing Justice Project, Growing Rooted Solidarity workshop & More

Climate Justice: 

 Win! Victoria Votes Unanimously For More Pocket Plazas and Parks: GVAT presses for more in Times Colonist letter. GVAT has been campaigning to get the City of Victoria and other municipalities to create more low-traffic neighbourhoods, including in multiple meetings with councillors. This vote is a significant win, but a lot more is needed, as we explain in this letter in the Times Colonist.

Campaigning for bus lanes and the right of wheelchair and mobility scooters to use bike and roll routes keeps rolling. GVAT’s work to get bus lanes for BC Transit’s proposed RapidBus has taken a new direction with Saanich’s Quadra McKenzie Study. We have already attended one workshop, and are working with Climate Justice Victoria members at UVic to get the university community involved in pressing for 24/7 bus lanes on McKenzie to UVic. We are also actively working to get the City of Victoria to once again advocate for provincial regulations to allow wheelchairs and mobility scooters on all ages and abilities bike and roll routes.

 Win! Sooke Council acts on GVAT’s recommendation and unanimously supports the Sierra Club’s Biodiversity Resolution.  As well as being a win for biodiversity and thus climate, this is a first for GVAT in building relationships with Sooke municipal councillors and influencing Sooke Council.  The Climate ART has worked diligently and successfully to spread GVAT’s reach throughout the CRD.

Affordable Housing:

Joining the call for real rent control! We joined our member organisation, BCGEU, at the legislature this September to call on the provincial government to tie rent increase caps to the unit, not the tenant.This is an important step in protecting renters and keeping rents affordable.

Solidarity with Housing Justice Project: Many of our member organizations took the initiative to sign on to the Open Letter for Homes for All which calls on all levels of government to address the homelessness crisis.

Following up with local elected leaders to hold them accountable to their commitments made during our 2022 Housing Assembly.

Core Teams Can Help Member Organizations

A recent Core Team 101 training offered online by our sister organization in Calgary attracted half a dozen GVAT folks, along with members from alliances in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. Core Teams have three purposes:

To energize your own members around the mission of your organization, strengthen internal relationships, and identify leaders.

To connect your organization to the work of Greater Victoria Acting Together as  a broad-based alliance.

 To maintain and grow your organization’s interest and work in the alliance, including supporting it financially. 

So a Core Team can help strengthen your own organization, encouraging strategic discussions that engage and connect members to each other and foster emerging leaders. But a crucial role of the Team is also to connect externally to GVAT, where your organization interacts with others to mobilize support for change to strengthen the common good. This means communicating back to your own organization the strategic objectives, short term actions, training opportunities and successes of GVAT in our community. Core Teams help make decisions more democratic by ensuring member voices are better represented in the alliance. These interactions allow Core Teams to reach out within their own organizations and connect to GVAT to provide feedback and direction, giving member organizations power and purpose within the alliance and helping sustain that membership through demonstrating the value of continued financial support.

Core teams can be built on existing groups within an organization, where there may already be organized interest in social or environmental justice, for example. They can be assembled from leaders of key committees that may exist already or initiated as part of the mandate of executives (e.g. responsible for external relations). Or a Core Team can be constituted through recruiting a handful of individuals on the basis of personal interest. The size of a Core Team can be very flexible as long as it has the capacity to undertake the tasks above. Want to learn more, receive a link to the recording of this training, and/or the Core Team 101 Manual? Contact marionpape@shaw.ca or Stephen Tyler treasurer@gvat.ca

Governance: We have a number of important projects underway. We are in the process of finalising our Annual Report for 2023, and our Annual Plan for 2024. We are also taking measures to clarify our decision making processes at all levels. Importantly, we are working on our plan to further weave justice, equity, diversity and inclusion through everything we do as an organisation.

Organising: We are in the process of planning our trainings for the next year, as part of our commitment to educating our members and developing leadership skills. We were able to host our first Foundations of Community Organizing training in several years this November! Thank you to BCGEU for hosting us. Please feel free to reach out to Izzy Adachi, GVAT’s organizer, at izzy@gvat.ca to suggest training opportunities, discuss your core team or your community

Events: First Unitarian Church of Victoria invites us to an event that fits with the work of GVAT’s Indigenous Relationships Learning Circle and our commitment to applying a reconciliation lens to all our work, and is a great prequel to a GVAT event currently in the planning stages by the Food and Agriculture Sub-Committee of our Climate Justice Team on land sharing.  Home - Treaty Land Sharing Network.

Title: Growing Rooted Solidarity: Allyship and Land Back
Location: First Unitarian Church of Victoria, 5575 W Saanich Rd, Victoria, BC V9E 2G1
Date/Time: Sat., March 9, 2-3:30pm

Attend In Person (entry by donation) or by Zoom.
Entry by donation to RAVEN (raventrust.com). 

Come spend an afternoon with RAVEN's Campaigns Director and Anishinaabe lawyer Leslie Anne St. Amour to learn about how to live in solidarity and allyship with Indigenous Nations. We will cover some basics of the colonial history of Canada and BC, the legal landscape relating to Indigenous people, the work of RAVEN and how this work is part of the larger Indigenous rights movement. 

Register: https://fundraise.raventrust.com/event/growing-rooted-solidarity-allyship-and-land-back/e559318