Access and Alternatives: Community Resources

Tony Alfonso from AMI-Quebec. All photos by Nasuna Stuart-Ulin.

The Access and Alternatives panel brought together the threads of conversations held throughout the Creative Resilience series, addressing the issues of scarcity and access to resources, as well as creative solutions that can inspire collaborations, and foster space for individual and community well-being. This panel was an opportunity to not only discuss structural barriers, but also explore the ways in which our artistic practices can be tools of knowledge, empowerment and healing. Click here to read the panel summary.

Resources

Thank you to all the Minute Market participants at Access and Alternatives! The Minute Market is an ELAN Member benefit, where participants are given a one-minute spot to market their latest work. The Minute Market at Access & Alternatives featured representatives from several community health and social services organizations based in Montreal. The resources listed here also include recommendations shared by our panelists:

Accessibilize Montreal (Facebook page): Grassroots organization challenging mainstream perceptions of disability through direct action. Speaking out against transit and systemic discrimination in Montreal.
Action Autonomie: Action Autonomie is a community non-profit organization. It has been set up by people who have used voluntary or non-mental health services. Their experiences will have forged the need to come together to assert their rights.
All Black Everything in Montreal: A working document, reviewed by Shanice Nicole, designed to gather up-to-date information about resources available and people working in Montreal’s various Black communities. The main goal is to support Black businesses, projects, people, and communities as a whole. List includes Healers, Therapists, Counsellors, Practitioners.
AMI-Quebec: AMI-Quebec is a non-profit organization that helps families manage the effects of mental illness through support, education, guidance, and advocacy. Programs are free!
List of BIPOC Mental Health Professionals: This project is being completed by CURE Concordia. The list includes the name of the professional, their professional title, their services, whether they are currently taking new clients, their email, their phone number, their ethnicity, their language(s), whether they identify as LGBTQ, whether they require a referral, their address, the accessibility of their space, their cost and whether insurance is accepted (in this order).
Community Healing Days: To acknowledge and shed light on the current and ever-increasing inequality gap, the privatization of our healthcare services and a rapidly deteriorating health care system, Tiger Lotus Coop and Physio Alternative, through direct action, will attempt to bring about a more positive outlook, transformative mindset and progressive model to the community’s and the individual’s health and well-being needs. With Community Healing Days, complementary health practitioners in the community offer their time and skills free of charge, bridging the gap that exists between private and public health models.
Growing Room Festival (Vancouver): Growing Room is Room magazine’s annual literary and arts festival, a celebration of diverse Canadian writers and artists which takes place every March on the traditional, unceded, and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples (Vancouver, British Columbia). Room is committed to deepening our learning about inclusion and accessibility, both within the systemic structures of the festival and the creative curation. Growing Room is a celebration, a protest, a reflection, a re-visioning, a gathering, a question, and a dream.
My Mental Health Matters: A non-profit organization founded in May 2018 by Haitian student Ernithe Edmond and Senegalese student Fama Tounkara. The organization uses the hashtag #MMHM2.
PLURI (Facebook page): PLURI stands for PEACE LOVE UNITY RESPECT INITIATIVE and specifically focuses on improving safety and inclusivity on dancefloors.
Physio Alternative: Physio Alternative provides quality and holistic treatments in the fields of Physiotherapy, Acupressure and natural remedies. These services will focus on community health equality through a sliding scale and barter approach and are ecologically rooted.
Resilience Montreal: Resilience Montreal is a collaboration between the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal and Nazareth Community. It is a low-barrier service open to everyone, providing food and shelter as well as mental health and medical support services and access to a multitude of other resources.
Spa de la Rue: Volunteer therapists at the Spa de la Rue offer massotherapy, osteopathy, naturopathy, foot care and more.

Discover more resources on our Community Links webpage!

Kevin Boire from Action Autonomie.

Accessibilize Montreal.

Sandra El-Sabbagh from AMI-Quebec.

PLURI.

Land Acknowledgement

ELAN is an official minority language organization within a country that recognizes two languages as official. ELAN is located in Tiohtià:ke, the original name for Montreal in Kanien’kéha, the language of the Mohawk—also known as Mooniyang, which is the Anishinaabeg name given to the city by the Algonquin. While we are based in this city, our projects have also taken place in many regions across Quebec.

We acknowledge the colonial origin of English and French in Canada, and recognize that both languages benefit from official status throughout the land. The province that we know as Quebec is an amalgamation of the traditional territories of the Innu and Inuit nations, Algonquian nations, as well as the Mohawk nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Kanien’kéha and Anishinaabemowin are but two of the original languages of this province; Atikamekw, Cree, Inuktitut, and Innu-aimun are also among the many Indigenous languages spoken across Quebec as majority languages, all well before French and English.

ELAN acknowledges the important work being done by First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples to revive the traditional languages of these territories, and their advocacy for the official status of Indigenous languages.

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