Disrupting Inevitability For Good

October is my favourite month - the weather, the leaves, travel for conferences, cozy sweaters, my daughters’ birthday, Thanksgiving turkey dinner, what’s not to love? 

However, I’ve been feeling a tension between being in my favourite month, and the harmful/ideologically-fuelled policies popping up: 

• I’m sipping my hot chocolate and reading my mayor’s op-ed reframing our homelessness issue as a park safety issue. 
• I’m admiring the fall leaves on my walk while listening to a podcast about the US election shenanigans.
• I’m enjoying dinner in Old Montreal with a colleague, where we discuss how the government bundled mental health and addictions together with homelessness and we thought it was just for convenience and maybe we’d get a bit more funding to work with, but now we see that by conflating mental health, addictions, and homelessness as one problem, they have paved the way for solutions like involuntary addictions treatment to disappear homeless people instead of, you know, building housing.

And as I have turned my attention to Canadian federal politics and the polls more this fall too, things getting worse feels…inevitable.

But our job is to disrupt that inevitability. For good. So I’m sharing three unrelated things that are keeping me hopeful and motivated right now.

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