Updates from The Stand

IT’S FESTIVAL SEASON! After two years in suspension, festival season has unleashed into full swing across the prairies. The Pride Festival and Jazz Fest kicked it off in June for Saskatoon.

As we write this, Back to Batoche is wrapping its 50th with exciting news of the Batoche Historic Site lands being returned to the Metis Nation!

Festivals can be a part of our radical self-care and community-care. A chance to celebrate life, reconnect with ourselves and each other, and remember the joy that makes liberation worth fighting for. A time to experience community-care as it could be.

Every month, we start The Stand’s board meeting the same way. First, we approve new member applications from individuals and grassroots groups. We welcomed two new member groups this month – the Saskatoon Peace Coalition and a brand new organization called the Ad Astra Foundation, which is building international solidarity and using a decolonizing perspective to guide international development work.

The Stand Community Organizing Centre is excited to announce the launch of our new online community calendar of public organizing and activist events fWe are excited to announce that The Stand Community Organizing Centre has launched an online, curated Community Calendar for activism and organizing events in Saskatoon/Treaty 6 Territory, and that we are devoting volunteer resources to its maintenance.

Friends, we are now entering the one-year point of the Covid-19 pandemic. There is no question that this past year has been a trying time for all of us, but the ravages of Covid-19 have exposed many of the inequities and injustices that plague our society. Routinely we hear that racialized communities are facing greater risks from the disease because of systemic racism in our public institutions. We also know from data produced by the Public Health Agency of Canada that Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan and across Canada face similar risks due to a lack of government action to ensure people’s safety.

Friends, we cannot be happier to be entering a new year.  2020 represented one of the most complicated years that many of us have ever experienced.  In addition to the many friends and loved ones who may have come into contact with Covid19, the inequity in our communities has made the pandemic even more difficult