Black Lives Matter

Sandy Hudson is a Toronto-based organizer, communications specialist, political strategist, and writer.
An award-winning activist, Sandy has been honoured as one of Toronto Life’s 50 Most Influential Torontonians in 2016, Post City Magazine’s 12 Most Inspiring Women of Toronto, a recipient of the Lincoln Alexander ’53 Award, the William P. Hubbard Award for Race Relations, Now Magazine’s Best Activist Campaign, Now Magazine’s Best Social Justice Group, the Terry Buckland Award for Diversity & Equity in Education, the Black one of Canada International Black Women’s 100 Black Women to watch, and featured in Racism-Free Ontario’s 100 People to Watch list.
Sandy is the founder of the Black Lives Matter movement presence in Canada and Black Lives Matter – Toronto.  She also co-founded the Black Liberation Collective – Canada, the campus-based extension of the movement. The work Sandy has accomplished with her team has been formidable, and her efforts to publicly address anti-Black racism have resulted in concrete policy change, including the winding down of the program that places police officers in the largest school board in North America.  is a Toronto-based organizer, communications specialist, political strategist, and writer.
An award-winning activist, Sandy has been honoured as one of Toronto Life’s 50 Most Influential Torontonians in 2016, Post City Magazine’s 12 Most Inspiring Women of Toronto, a recipient of the Lincoln Alexander ’53 Award, the William P. Hubbard Award for Race Relations, Now Magazine’s Best Activist Campaign, Now Magazine’s Best Social Justice Group, the Terry Buckland Award for Diversity & Equity in Education, the Black one of Canada International Black Women’s 100 Black Women to watch, and featured in Racism-Free Ontario’s 100 People to Watch list.
Sandy is the founder of the Black Lives Matter movement presence in Canada and Black Lives Matter – Toronto.  She also co-founded the Black Liberation Collective – Canada, the campus-based extension of the movement. The work Sandy has accomplished with her team has been formidable, and her efforts to publicly address anti-Black racism have resulted in concrete policy change, including the winding down of the program that places police officers in the largest school board in North America. 

Norman (Otis) Richmond aka Jalali is a Toronto Arts Award winner. Richmond is the producer of the weekly radio show Diasporic Music on https://blackpower96.org/  His column Diasporic Music appears monthly in the Burning Spear newspaper. Richmond recently received the Jackie Robinson Fortitude Award from 1^st Friday’s.

El Jones is a poet, educator, journalist and advocate. She was the fifth Poet Laureate of Halifax, and currently holds the 15th Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. El is a co-founder of the Black Power Hour, a radio show developed collectively with prisoners. Her weekly column can be read online on Saturdays in the Halifax Examiner, and her book of spoken word, Live from the Afrikan Resistance!, was released in 2014 from Roseway Press. Her advocacy and work fights anti-Black racism in Canada, walking in the path of our great-grandmothers who resisted relentlessly. 

Idil Abdillahi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Ryerson University. As a critical interdisciplinary scholar, she has published on a wide array of topics such as: mental health, poverty, HIV/AIDS, organizational development, and several other key policy areas at the intersection of Black life and state interruption. Most notably, Idil’s cutting-edge research and scholarship on anti-Black sanism has informed the current debates on fatal police shootings of Black Mad identified peoples. Recently, her theorizing helped inform the inquest of Andrew Loku, one among the litany of Black men fatally killed by Police Services in the Greater Toronto Area. She comes to this work with over 15 years of direct practice experience in the social service sector. Idil has been a frontline social worker, supervisor, clinical educator and has also been in leadership and governance roles.  Her lengthy history as a practitioner in clinical, forensic and grassroots settings, led to her being honoured with several awards and accolades for her work in mental health in Toronto. Upon transitioning to the academy in 2011, Idil was nominated as a “Professor Who Made a Mark” and she later won the prestigious Viola Desmond Award, celebrating the achievements of strong Black Canadian Women in 2015. Idil is a community organizer, strategist, public intellectual and academic, unapologetically committed to the freedom, fight and joy for Black lives in this city, province and country.