Josephine Grey is a Human Rights Organizer and a force for good whose name we all should know...she is a powerful voice for low income families, having created an organization called LIFT (Low Income Families Together) when her own life circumstances (while living under the throat grasp of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy) caused her to come face to face with poverty and food security issues.
Having had the very good fortune myself to have taken an online workshop with her through my course this spring and having interacted with her as moderator of a module, I am awed by her ability to lay it out there when it comes to supporting people towards meeting their basic needs with dignity. Her social justice knowledge and her advocacy work in the name of human rights is so incredibly important in these times we are living.
The immediately following notes are rough excerpts from an Appointed interview with Josephine Grey, UN Human Rights advocate and single mother living in Toronto, Canada.
...raising her children and struggling to feed them she became involved in politics in 1990's...
...she has a UN mandate to focus on domestic issues...human rights and social development in Canada....most of her work is unwaged...
...her mother was very aware of land use and environmental issues and then when Josephine became a single parent...she needed to find healthy food that was free of chemical additives due to food sensitivities and she needed to access food banks...
Key recommendations on food security and health for BIPOC people and their intersection with Basic Income... direct quote below also taken as transcript from Appointed interview:
...if we want to see a healthy stable sustainable society we need to take all human rights into account and many people are not aware of the human rights treaty Canada has signed....
The International covenant on economic and social and cultural rights has a range of articles that Canada is legally committed to uphold and protect although many people are not really aware of them...and that includes the right to food...
and the right to food covers not just that people get to eat but it covers the fact that the food should be healthy it should be affordable it should be culturally appropriate....
to feed people what actually makes them healthy...and look at the rights we have agreed to as a nation and figure out how to adjust our government systems and our public investments to reflect and respect those human rights...
we can't solve issues of inequity and hunger and all those other things by simply focusing on one thing at at time...
so the issue of Basic income is incredibly important to us because we believe that...to shift our systems...to shift our livelihoods to become more sustainable to mitigate climate change and adapt to effects climate change people need the ability to have control of their time to change their behaviour... to do things differently...to change their careers and things like that so BIG is an incredibly imp strategy for giving communities farmers, food producers the freedom to adapt and change what we do...
Josephine Grey
Rally info below taken from Chris O's Citizen Alliance Newsletter:
Friday, June 23rd:
The BIG Rally, 12noon, outside the Coles Building,
from the Facebook event notice:
"Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) has the potential to uplift individuals and families out of poverty, foster economic stability, and create a more equitable society. Premier Dennis King has made a promise to implement BIG with the assistance of the federal government.
The PEI Working Group for a Liveable Income (PEI WGLI) has been active in obtaining petition signatures on behalf of Coalition Canada basic income. We’d like to invite you to Coles building at noon on June 23 to help them with their initiative.
We’ll have guest speakers on hand including: Laurie Michael & Marie Burge from the PEI WGLI, Island New Democrat leader Michelle Neill, CUPE PEI president Ashley Clark, PSAC Area Council Debi Buell, PEI Federation of Labour president Carl Pursey..."
Thanks for reading!
Jill