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A Community United: The Danforth Multifaith Commons and Beyond
Walking into the Saturday morning Shabbat services at the Danforth Jewish Circle, you notice Jesus staring down at you from the stained glass windows. You also notice the overwhelming warmth and friendliness you’re greeted with. The Danforth Jewish Circle is an inclusive Jewish congregation that operates out of the Eastminster United Church, at Danforth and Jackman avenues. The East End United Church (EEU), the Danforth Jewish Circle (DJC), and the Neighbourhood Unitarian Universalist Congregation (NUU) are three different religious congregations that share this building and collectively form the Danforth Multifaith Commons (DMC). The concept of the DMC intrigued me from the start. It’s not every day that you see three…
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The Many Facets of Food Rescue at Eastview Neighbourhood Community Centre
Bridget Marzin’s job is to rescue food. As the Food Security Worker at Eastview Neighbourhood Community Centre, located in surburbia just off the Danforth, Marzin oversees dozens of volunteers and hundreds of food bank participants. Every day, she looks for new opportunities to reduce waste, rescue food, and secure donations to provide better food access for the Danforth community. Eastview Centre’s food bank runs on Tuesdays from noon to 2 p.m., when they serve households of one or two people, and again on Thursdays at the same time, when they serve households of three or more. “I don’t think anyone has the right to say who can and cannot [access…
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Green Merchant Cannabis Boutique: Cultivating a Sense of Community Through Cannabis
Ever since the overdue legalization of cannabis in Canada, cannabis dispensaries have become a ubiquitous and unignorable aspect of every neighbourhood in Toronto. Although each area of the city varies in its quirks, a commonality between them is their abundance of dispensaries. Not even the Danforth community—in all its unique and eclectic glory—is exempt from the influx of dispensaries Toronto is experiencing. If you’re walking along the Danforth, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll come across at least one, if not multiple. With such a plenitude of dispensaries, it’s easy to assume that they’re all monotonous businesses that only sell cannabis. However, Green Merchant Cannabis Boutique, located at 294 Danforth…
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Let’s Get Personal: Mutual Aid on the Danforth
“I’m iffy about billionaire romantic heroes,” says Jackie Olynyk, local romance author. She wants to write characters that she likes, and not someone “that’s a big, capitalist mogul.” Olynyk describes her writing as a mix between “cozy comfort and fierce rebellion,” which represents her evident desire to embrace anti-capitalism not only in her creative writing, but also in her community on the Danforth. Olynyk brings this energy into her volunteer work for local mutual aid organization The Personal Care Bank (TPCB). “I love our community, I love Toronto,” she says. “It’s easy to shut everything else [out] and focus on yourself, [… but] I really want to see us all…
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Find Your Community: East End Arts
I grew up in India where playing an active role in your community was extremely important. The neighbours knew each other and celebrated festivals together. Whenever my mother ran out of an important ingredient while cooking, she would give me the sacred responsibility of asking my neighbour to lend us some. For me, community was something you could rely on. After moving to Toronto for further education in 2021, I experienced a serious culture shock. For the first time, I was without a community. I felt as if my own skin was missing from my body and the task of building a community from scratch seemed vital. I attended different…
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An Othered Cuisine
Food. Something so simple can have such a resounding effect on how we interact with ourselves and others around us. Staple Nigerian dishes and the accompanying scents were a commonplace in my childhood, having grown up in a Nigerian household. Dishes and scents were also intrinsically tied to community as they were a common component of Nigerian events and functions my family would take part in. The realization that something so common in my day-to-day life could be othered and viewed as strange had not occurred to me until I reached elementary school. Though I was surrounded by Nigerians outside school, the same sense of diversity I derived from those…
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Happy 186th Birthday, Toronto!
March 6, 2020 marks Toronto’s 186th birthday when the town of York became the city we now know and love! Starting out with a humble population of 9,000, Toronto has now grown to become the fourth largest city in North America which includes other regions like Etobicoke, North York, York, East York, and Scarborough. As one of North America’s most multicultural hubs, with representations of many different cultures and neighbourhoods, Toronto is a unique place to live, work, and play. From the construction of the CN Tower in 1976 to the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum in 2007, Toronto has seen a lot of development over…
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Curly Hair Care: A Community of Embracing Self-Love and Identity
In the 1960s, Black activists started a natural hair movement that Marcus Garvey summed up in one statement "Don't remove the kinks from your hair—remove them from your brain." Black hair has gone through many regulations, phases, and trends throughout North American history. Among the many hardships the Black community has faced, the suppression of their natural features has been a persistent social hurdle that they have worked to overcome.
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Finding Meaning in the Mundane
Throughout my undergraduate studies I worked at a burger place. Situated across from a hospital, I served many customers, who were waiting out a turbulent moment in life and finding brief respite in a bite and a beer. Often until 3 a.m., I would serve patrons on the all-too-typical intoxicated quest for sustenance, saving them from their otherwise inevitable morning malady. Over the four years I worked there, their faces underwent the gradual shift from unknown to familiar. On occasion, walking down the street and observing those around me, I’d be panged with the querying nudge of almost-recognition–––the foggy notion that I knew that face––– and, suddenly, I’d remember them…
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The Space Between Places
To be a part of a new place is an intimate experience—that's why it's called personal belonging. The intimacy of Danforth community, explored—through the eyes of a newcomer to Toronto.
