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Several young people from around Toronto who stepped up to make a positive impact on the LGBTQ+ community in 2021 won recognition for their work by a Vancouver-based non-profit earlier this month.
The efforts filled a void for many people struggling to deal with isolation and mental health challenges arising from the pandemic that wasn’t being adequately addressed elsewhere.
“When the whole pandemic really became obscene and things started to go haywire, I realized that a lot of people around me were suffering from anxiety and depression, stress due to losing jobs and the situation we’re going through,” said 27-year-old Weam Charaf Eddine, one of two first runners-up for the Sher Vancouver awards.
“Especially in the queer community, if felt like there was no one interested in helping,” they said.
So in late 2020, Charaf Eddine started Meditate for Change, offering daily online mindfulness practice to teach the mostly queer folks around him how to maintain their mental health. This caught the attention of several Toronto LGBTQ+ organizations, which brought him in to run workshops for them.
He has also shifted the focus of Beyond Toronto Life, a meetup group with more than 1,500 members he started in 2016 as an urban hiking club, to include more mindfulness activities and restorative hikes.
“Life is about sharing, it's about caring, and this work made me realize the importance of social connection, and the power that we have as individuals to lead social change,” they said.
Their latest project is Arab Queer Hub, which aims to help queer Arabic speakers engage with each other and with relevant issues at a depth they might not able to achieve in English. They are interested in finding out how more mental health services in Canada could be delivered in the mother tongue of new arrivals.
The January Marie Lapuz Youth Leadership Awards from Sher Vancouver, a non-profit focused on supporting queer South Asians and their friends, celebrate anyone aged between 16 and 30 doing meaningful work in the 2SLGBTQ+ community.
The awards have been given every year since 2015 in honour of the group’s first trans executive, who died in 2012 at the age of 26.
One of the second runners-up in the awards, 26-year-old Mohammad Al Akel, said he started a Facebook group specifically for LGBTQ+ people from the Middle East in Canada because there weren't active groups for the community and “someone had to do it.”
Al Akel himself came to Canada from Lebanon in 2017, and now works as settlement manager at the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention, where he helps mostly LGBTQ+ refugees and newcomers adapt.
This can involve one-on-one orientation on housing, employment, health and transportation, helping clients find a family doctor, sharing sexual health information, offering translation and interpretation (for Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, and Turkish), and making referrals to housing, mental health and harm reduction resources.
Al Akel said it was challenging to discuss LGBTQ+ issues in Lebanon, where the subject remains largely taboo, and that he felt safer to increase his advocacy once he came to Canada.
“I lost many friends, got insulted many times for being my true authentic self, and had to cut ties with family members and become totally independent,” the 26-year-old said.
“In Canada, my advocacy increased, I felt safer to do so, and I was successful in changing my family's perception in Canada about the topic of homosexuality, and now they finally accept me,” he added.
Sher Vancouver also recognized four emerging youth leaders under 24 in this year’s awards, including Russell Rotem Levy from Mississauga and Isiah Neves from London, Ont., who each received $200 in prize money.
The overall winner was Crecien Bencio from Vancouver, who received $1,000 in prize money. The first runners-up got $600 each and second runners-up received $400, while honourable mentions and emerging leaders received $200 each.
Morgan Sharp / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer
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