Urban Alliance on Race Relations honour anti-hate advocates
December 13, 2024
Pregnant at 18 just after becoming the first in her family to complete high school, Camille Orridge had her mother’s support.
“I clearly remember her saying it is not about this pregnancy and the child, but what you are going to do with the rest of your life,” she said in 2012. “While it was not the end of the world, what she was saying was that I would have to make sacrifices at a young age and work hard to achieve my goals while being a single parent.”
Orridge, who came to Canada two years later in 1967 to join her mother, Lillian Orridge, and an aunt, Sylvia Morgan, followed the sound advice and it paid off.
She became the first in her family to attend university and earn a degree.
Now retired after almost five decades championing equity in health care, Orridge was recognized at the Urban Alliance on Race Relations (UARR) Racial Justice Awards gala in Scarborough on December 7.
“It is an honour to receive an award from my community,” she said. “I am particularly impressed with how this organization has evolved over the years where young people have stepped forward to move the agenda. That gives us a lot of hope for the future. What also stands out for me is that the youths are doing the work together across race, sexual orientation and religion. Most movements have not operated in this way.”
After working as a Ward Maid at Toronto General Hospital and in a clerical role at Toronto Western Hospital, Orridge returned to Jamaica briefly in 1972. She studied Records Administration in the United States before coming back to Canada and earning a Master’s in Health Administration from the University of Toronto which awarded her an honourary doctorate in June 2022.
Very community-oriented, she co-founded Pathways to Education in 2001 to help young Black students stay in school, the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention and the Canadian Home Care Association.
Orridge also led the development of a code of ethics for care in the community while serving with the Joint Centre for Bioethics and was a member of the provincial Emergency Room/Alternate Level-of-Care Expert Panel, the Business Lead for the Resource Matching & Referral project and Co-Chair of the Aging at Home Council and the Integrated Care for Complex Populations Task Force at the Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network (LHIN).
Where did the passion for community engagement and advocating for social change come from?
“My mom, my aunt (Beryl Nelson) and teachers at Camperdown High School in Jamaica,” Orridge pointed out without hesitation. “They gave me a sense of security. I always knew I could go home…Back in the day, not much was expected from us as the first group of Black kids to get scholarships. But we had some great teachers like Winifred Smith and Pamela Mordecai who told us we could do it. They said we could make a difference and that it was not only what you do, but how you used what you do to make a difference for others. That was my inspiration for community engagement.”
Becoming Toronto Central LHIN Chief Executive Officer in 2010, she led the organization with an annual budget of $175 million, serving close to 19,000 clients annually.
Three years ago, Orridge was honoured with Ricoh Canada Top 25 Women of Influence Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to social change and healthcare equity.
In 1997, Dr. Ingrid Waldron was a UARR Board member and volunteer.
Imagine the pride and gratitude when she stepped up to receive an award for her ground-breaking environmental racism work.
“It is an honour to receive an award from an organization that has been a true leader in addressing all forms of racism for decades,” said Waldron whose interest in the form of systemic racism started in 2012 when a White environmentalist approached her to take on a project. “This award would not have been possible without the relationships I have developed over the years with members of the Indigenous, Black and other racialized communities that invited me into their communities and homes and shared their stories with me.”
Environmental racism is the disproportionate location of industrial polluters such as landfills, trash incinerators, coal plants, toxic waste facilities and other environmentally hazardous activities near to communities of colour and the working poor.
“I had never heard about environmental racism then and knew nothing about environmental issues,” Waldron said. “While I was hesitant to take on a project on an issue I knew very little about, I was a bit intrigued by the topic and thirsty for a new challenge that I thought could potentially have real impact in communities, particularly those in Nova Scotia where I started this work.”
Her newest book, ‘From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: Tracing the Impacts of Racial Trauma in Black Communities from the Colonial Era to the Present’, is a wide-ranging exploration of the historical and ongoing impact of racism on the mental health of Black communities in Canada, the United States and England.
UARR Board member Emily Mooney (l) & Executive Director Neethan Shan made the presentation to Dr. Ingrid Waldron (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
In 2012, Waldron started the ‘ENRICH Project’ that is a unique and innovative initiative addressing the health and socioeconomic effects of environmental racism in Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities. Three years later, the Project collaborated with New Democratic Party Member of Parliament Lenore Zann to develop the first Private Members Bill to address environmental racism in Canada.
The implementation of her first water testing projects in African Nova Scotian communities, her policy work with the Nova Scotia Health Authority and the 2016 collaboration with Shelburne community members that resulted in the closure of their landfill were recognized by Dalhousie University in 2018 which honoured her with the President’s Research Award for Research Impact.
The project is an adaptation of her book, ‘There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities’, that was released six years ago.
The HOPE Chair in Peace & Health in McMaster University’s Global Peace & Social Justice program, Waldron was last July named among the inaugural Global 50 Women in Sustainability by SustainabilityX Magazine.
After 26 years with the Toronto Catholic District School Board, Kirk Mark retired in 2017.
He has been associated with the UARR for over three decades, serving on committees before transitioning to the Board 25 years ago.
Mark was the recipient of the Agent of Change Award.
Kirk Mark (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
“To know that someone was paying attention when I was putting a variety of strategies in place in school boards and communities and working with students and parents is a great feeling,” said the Canadian Alliance of Black Educators President and Founding Director of Willowdale Community Legal Services.
Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, was the keynote speaker at the celebration.
“Your advocacy, your leadership and your commitment to making our communities safer and equitable for everyone is so inspiring and so necessary, especially as we do find ourselves in some bleak times,” she said. “As a journalist, advocate and labour union staffer, I had often been working side by side by many folks just like you to advocate for a Canada we can all be proud of where we work towards advancing truth and reconciliation and combatting systemic forms of racism and discrimination.
“While community solidarity is of incredible importance, not only must it be sustained but we must engage with political discourse. We must address the underlying grievances that are being weaponized against our collective solidarity and we have to work cleverly together at defending not only our pluralistic democracy, but root such work within an anti-racist mindset that it acknowledges anti-racism and supports rehabilitation of our institutions. This means that we infuse our educational systems with critical thinking skills that our young people will need to navigate and understand this climate.”
Even before her appointment in January 2023, Elghawaby said she saw first-hand the deepening challenges faced by racialized and marginalized communities.
“Our country, with its lofty promise of diversity and inclusion, continues to confront an alarming rise in hate and discrimination, especially hate targeting racial and religious communities,” noted the former Canadian Anti-Hate Network Board member.”
Canada’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia Amira Elghawaby was recognized at the UARR gala (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
Hate crime incidents have spiked significantly since events in the Middle East unfolded in October 2023.
“Communities are facing a growing tide of hostility,” Elghawaby pointed out. “This optic and hate is not merely an abstract problem. It is a harsh reality for far too many people in Canada. And make no mistake, a country built on the disenfranchisement and oppression of the First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities was always going to struggle to meet the expectations it had set for itself. A house built on a damaged foundation would be in constant disrepair until the foundation is restored. For those of us who are settlers to these lands, we must fully understand this and do all we can to stand in allyship with our Indigenous brothers and sisters.”
She said it is critical to underscore the importance of how hate and polarization against any one group in society will directly or indirectly harm people’s well-being, particularly when it comes to exercising the rights and freedoms that everyone is supposedly guaranteed within provincial human rights codes and the Charter of Rights & Freedoms.
“Make no mistake but we have learnt again and again that we cannot take these rights for granted,” added Elghawaby. “We must understand that at any point, our rights could be taken away and, at any moment, our lives can be changed if we let hate go unchecked in our society.”
Other award winners were writer, producer and television/radio host Amanda Parris, labour union activist Vanessa Stoby, multidisciplinary artist Hannia Cheng, educator Shannon Simpson and the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario.
Atulya Sharman received the award on behalf of the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
Parris’ theatre play, ‘Other Side of the Game’ was recognized with the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama and her short play, ‘The Death News’ won the 2022 Canadian Screen Award for Best Writing, Web Program or Series and was published in the anthology 21 Black Futures.
Amanda Parris (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
Earlier this year, she released the six-part documentary series, ‘For the Culture with Amanda Parris’, that she created, executive produced and hosts.
A York Region Secondary School teacher for 14 years, Stoby’s dedication to equity is evident through her four-year tenure on the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation’s Equity Group where she created and delivered impactful workshops on racial justice, cultivating resilience and poverty and class bias.
Vanessa Stoby (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
With an inter-arts practice, Tea Base, operating out of Chinatown Centre since 2018, Cheng has a curiosity about ways of resilience and the speculative futures that exist in the greater unknown of our daily lives.
Simpson championed the recent Indigenous tuition initiative at the University of Toronto which covers the cost of tuition for members of nine neighbouring First Nations as well as offering domestic tuition rates to Indigenous students from provinces outside of Ontario and the continental United States.
The event featured spoken word artist Yasmin Said, Tamil dance Ensemble members Rithika & Jaya Jeristus, vocalist Kathleen Zaragosa and pannist Suzette Vidale.
Suzette Vidale (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
Concerned about escalating hate-motivated violence in the city, the late Dr. Wilson Head and six other Torontonians met at a restaurant in May 1975 to discuss the issue.
Out of that meeting emerged the UARR with a mandate to work to maintain stable, peaceful and harmonious relationships among various racial and ethnic groups in the Greater Toronto Area.
UARR President Nigel Barriffe (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
“I am humbled to be standing on the shoulders on those who have built the UARR and have been on this long journey, including Kirk Mark,” said President Nigel Barriffe. “As a caretaker, I am very happy to see that the organization is still relevant and doing the work to make to support community members who might sometimes feel there is no hope.”
To mark its 50th anniversary next year, the UARR will launch a 10-year strategy plan.
“We talked to a number of people through focus groups and surveys and are hoping that that will be a phenomenal community collective effort,” said Executive Director Neethan Shan.
