Rad Voices was a monthly series aired on Constructing Change the podcast of the Activist Toolkit. The show was made possible thanks to a CKLN-FM legacy grant and featured one-on-one interviews with grassroots radicals from across the country. Though the activists came from many different backgrounds and movements, they all shared a drive and passion for their work.
Here are five radical voices you should listen to:
1) Sara and Asam on intersectionality and fatness. Sara and Asam are two organizers from the It Gets Fatter Project (IGF), a body positivity project for fat queer people of colour. IGF doesn’t try to tell folks that one day, it will get better — they encourage folks to love themselves as they are using an intersectional approach to fatness. Originally a Tumblr, sharing videos and pictures of the experiences of fat queer people of colour, the IGF Project now runs a support group at the University of Toronto for fat people of colour, hosts workshops for community groups and organizations on body positivity and desirability, and recently received a grant from Art Reach Toronto for more programming.
2) Janice Lee on anti-oppression in spoken word. Janice is a singer, songwriter, spoken word artist and activist. Whether she’s singing about security culture with her band, Janice Lee and the Free Radicals or organizing a political poetry slam, her work merges art and activism to inspire discussion. She is the artistic director for the Kitchener Waterloo Poetry Slam, and a member of the Spoken Word Canada safer spaces committee. She uses her poetry to create conversations around race, class, sexuality and the intersections between these identities.
3) Marty Fink on the criminalization of trans and queer people. Marty Fink is an anti-prison activist. They work in many mediums, from comics and zines to academic papers to talk about HIV/AIDS, harm reduction and trans identity. They have been a part of the Prisoner Correspondence Project in Montreal for half a decade, helping queer and trans prisoners resist isolation in the prison system. They are currently teaching queer studies at Georgia Tech while continuing their work on HIV/AIDs activist histories and prison abolition.
4) Lori Kufner on harm reduction. Lori is the project coordinator at the TRIP! project, a Toronto based peer-driven harm reduction group. Started in 1995 by partiers for partiers, TRIPP empowers youth to support and educate their peers in a non-judgmental way. Lori is a co-founder of Newmindspace a group that reclaims often privatized or corporatized space through wacky free events, like pillow fights and capture-the-flag tournaments. She has organized annual events involving thousands of people that are now practiced around the world.
5) Julie Lalonde on feminist movements. Julie has been a feminist activist for almost a decade. Organizing for survivors of sexual assault and for reproductive justice, Julie has been involved with numerous campaigns and groups including the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, the Ms. G Project, The Radical Handmaids and more. She started the Coalition for a Sexual Assault Centre at Carleton University and won a student-run centre in September 2013. She continues to organize and speak out against injustice in Ottawa.
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