The Same Difference

Toronto is known to be home to most diverse residents in Canada. The city prides itself in this but most of us -- Youth of precarious migration status -- feel less welcomed here. We often face a stigma which creates barriers hindering us from accessing social services, and sometimes causing trauma and a feeling of exclusion or other negative impacts like hesitating before seeking help. Due to this, we wanted to open a dialogue with service providers in settlement organizations, schools, shelters and other places where we wanted to bring forward an interaction on how to have a better sense of how to support us and share our experiences.

With help from the Speaking Rights initiative (by Equitas), the poem called “The Same Difference” became a video, which was then showed in an interactive, hour-long workshop for service providers working with precarious youth populations. The project involved collaborating to create a spoken word poem that addressed how stereotypes, myths, prejudices and stigma surrounding youth with precarious immigration are affecting us. The process gave us a platform to voice the many issues that we face, including ones that don’t get a lot of attention in the community and in the media.

We intend to continue using the video as an entering point to more workshops and inform the promising practices of current and future service providers when working with precarious migrant youth.
We simply voiced our realities through a video!

Thank you : Equitas
FCJ Refugee Centre
FCJ Youth Network