“Every Other Monday” East Van Migrant Workers Poetry Collective
“Migrant workers had the opportunity to express themselves. They can exist like visibly, with a lot of care and support.”
Sabrina Qistina, recipient of Connect to Community Grant for 2023-2024.
Project Description
The East Van Migrant Workers Poetry Collective is a project which invited migrant workers across the Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood area to form a solidarity network of mutual aid, political education (e.g. tenant rights workshops), and cultural-oriented craft work (e.g. poetry reading/writing). Poetry writing sessions, events, and zines were organized and created to offer migrant workers creative tools to self-advocate through cultural expression and portray their political struggles.
Community Partner Description
Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH) provides services and community development initiatives aimed at improving the quality of life of residents in the Renfrew-Collingwood area of east Vancouver.
Activities are targeted primarily to low and middle income families. Services are delivered in a variety of languages with emphasis on building social connections, capacity, cross-cultural sharing and life-long learning. Residents of all ages participate in educational, cultural, social, health, economic and recreational services, as well as contribute towards building a safe and caring community through volunteer contributions, leadership and partnership development.
Lessons Learned
Sabrina shared about learning ways to engage in community work ethically with vulnerable populations and bolster their voices:
“When we held a ‘know your rights’ workshop, a lot of the workers we wanted to go through a feedback survey. Workers were concerned about confidentiality and potential retaliation from employers. Sometimes reporting requirements requires like material reports with photographs and videos of what has happened below. I loved how this grant had given the opportunity to give a report in any form because that allowed just like the bandwidth of confidentiality that we can do events in. So I think in some ways we weren’t just like taking photographs because we realized that a lot of migrants are not especially comfortable with photographs. After an event we’ll have some of us check in with folks, one on one, and ask them about how the event went for them and if we could take notes of the debrief to get a lot of these narrative reports back without revealing the identity or photo graph of the person.”
Project Outcomes
Sabrina expressed the importance of witnessing community work in action when describing her most meaningful project outcome:
“For one of the events we had a collage making and story sharing event. Migrant workers to share their stories and migration and also how they came here, what it meant for them to leave home, and to leave some really important family members in your lives. Migrant workers had the opportunity to express themselves. They can exist like visibly, with a lot of care and support.”
Advice for Future Applicants
For students considering applying for a CCEL Grant, Sabrina offers some valuable advice:
“Have a solid understanding of the partner organization that they’re working with beyond the level of like a partnership or the meeting, but like really understanding what they need and what is a gap that this grant can fill. Another thing that’s cruicial is maybe having a peer lead support model in the project. That’s really important and so that the timelines and the deadlines and their deliverables don’t just fall on the people leading the project.”
Information about CCEL Grants
If you are a student interested in leading your own UBC CCEL project, you can learn more about the application process here. Year round advising for grant projects and applications are available via Zoom or in-person at our office on the UBC Vancouver office from Monday to Friday. For more information about year round advising, please email us at community.learning@ubc.ca to book an appointment.