SHIFT's Funded Partners
Imagining alternative ways of working and living together
The project of social transformation requires thinking outside of existing systems and opening new possibilities of living together. These groups and organizations address the failings of institutions by imagining better and more just alternatives, in everything from land-based practices to fostering youth ownership.
Tka:nios
Tka:nios,“it grows”, refers to the direction of growth from Ionkhi’nistenha tsi iohontsa: te (Our Mother Earth). In collaboration with Elders and other community members, this project seeks to reclaim traditional Haudenosaunee ways of life and food sovereignty by placing women at the forefront of sharing knowledge and cultural legacy.
Total SHIFT funding received: $130,000
Brique par Brique
Brique par Brique a non-profit organization created by community organizers and professionals of colour to build affordable housing and community solidarity in the multicultural and rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood of Parc-Extension. The team works with residents to develop educational and leisure programming in the neighbourhood to nurture local leadership and support local talents.
Total SHIFT funding received: $27,000
Harambec
Born out of a project that worked to shed light on the mechanisms of exclusion and oppression experienced by Black women in Quebec's feminist movement, the Harambec Black Feminist Collective continues the fight against systemic erasure and violence experienced by Black women and gender-expansive folks in Quebec institutions.
Total SHIFT Funding Received: $105,000
Co-op CultivAction
CultivAction is a registered solidarity cooperative campus-community farm that aims to facilitate transitions towards food sovereign communities by practicing regenerative agriculture, cultivating urban green spaces, and supporting sustainable food production. CultivAction was initially funded for their urban garden collaboration with the Comité de vie de quartier Duff-Court in Lachine.
Total SHIFT funding received: $57,000
Press Start
Press Start creates employment, leadership opportunities, and a safe space for marginalized youth, including racialized, LGBTQI+, differently abled and financially insecure folks. The Press Start Employment Initiative (PSEI) is a mentorship program where youth are paired with mentors that guide them through work placements in Batîment 7, Pointe Saint-Charles and Greater Montreal.
Total SHIFT funding received: $17,000
Community Healing Days
An initiative of the Tiger Lotus Coop, the Family Care Collective and a network of hands-based healing practitioners, Community Healing Days offers low-cost sliding scale specialist clinics addressing trans healthcare, perinatal health, and reproductive and menstrual health. The team aims to create proof of concept for integrating their approaches further into Quebec’s health care system.
Total SHIFT funding received: $88,000
Li-Ber-T House
Li-Ber-T House first received funding from SHIFT to advance their plans of offering supportive and inclusive transitional housing to women exiting addiction rehabilitation or incarceration facilities. They hope to increase the likelihood of successful transitions to healthy and safe futures for marginalised women. Li-Ber-T House collaborates with Dr. Felice Yuen from Applied Human Sciences.
Total SHIFT funding received: $34,000
Hamidou Horticulture
Hamidou Horticulture is an urban agriculture project focused on the production and sale of ethnic and ancient vegetable plants, and a program for training Afro-descendent families to learn the techniques of cultivation, production, marketing, and distribution. SHIFT has supported Hamidou Horticulture developing an accredited course at Concordia University through the Centre of Continuing Education.
Total SHIFT funding received: $35,000
DESTA Black Youth Network
DESTA received funding from SHIFT for their project I know why the caged bird sings, a reintegration initiative in collaboration with researchers, community organizers, and individuals with lived experience to address the challenges that formerly incarcerated Black men face as they attempt to successfully transition back into society. Through their SHIFT funding, DESTA created shareable video and written resources.
Total SHIFT funding received: $20,000
Young Roots City
Building from relationships developed with youth at Teen Haven and Tyndale through their participation in Camp Amy Molson, Young Roots City worked to engage youth in vulnerable circumstances in the bioremediation of land located in Montreal. Youth participants will acquire homesteading skills while helping to create the first carbon-neutral camp in Canada.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Fostering grassroots resistance to oppressive institutional structures
From gentrification and colonialism to the climate emergency, these groups & organizations are mobilizing residents, building coalitions, and advocating against those structures and policies that create and reinforce injustice.
Comité d'action Parc-Extension
Comité d'action Parc-Extension (CAPE) creates space for collective tenant organizing through letter-writing campaigns, rallies, and with demonstrations to counter disproportionate power dynamics in fighting evictions. CAPE also works closely with the Parc-Ex Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and in Collaboration with Concordia’s Office of Community Engagement to conduct research into the effects of gentrification in Parc-Extension.
Total SHIFT funding received: $20,000
JIA Foundation
The JIA Foundation's mission is to protect and promote the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Montréal’s Chinatown by creating projects that activate public spaces and significant historic buildings through storytelling and intergenerational exchange, as well as to develop expertise and tools that the community can use to map out and advocate for its future.
Total SHIFT funding received: $15,000
Climate Justice Montreal
Climate Justice Montreal (CJM) is a non-hierarchical, consensus-based grassroots group that recognizes the climate crisis as inextricably linked to colonialism, capitalism, and systemic oppression. They pursue environmental and climate justice through education, mobilization and collective action, and have received funding from SHIFT through various special campaigns anchored in solidarity coalition-building with various Montreal groups.
Total SHIFT funding received: $20,000
Solidarity Across Borders
Recognizing that non-status migrants have a vital leadership role to play in advancing systemic change in the immigration system, SHIFT has provided support to Solidarity Across Borders for two projects prioritizing network-building and amplifying non-status migrant voices that aimed to increase the capacity and sustainability of existing migrant-led solidarity movements.
Total SHIFT funding received: $20,000
PINAY Quebec
For over three decades, PINAY Quebec has been working to organize and empower migrant Filipino women and families across the province. During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, PINAY received funding from SHIFT for their project Kapit-Bisig Laban Covid, a virtual connection hub that enabled people to sign up for timely support and connect with volunteers available for mutual aid.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Indigenous Support Workers' Project
The Indigenous Support Workers' Project was funded by SHIFT for "Gathering Vision," their project aimed at facilitating focused conversations with members of the Indigenous community about identity, belonging, and self-advocacy. The longer-term goal of this work is to support and resource the ISWP's capacity to act as co-partners in increasing community empowerment.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Art by Omar Bernal for the Art for Social Change project.
Art for Social Change (Montreal en Action)
This Montreal-wide project worked to build a grassroots network that represents the interests of the city’s racialized artists. The project aimed to launch a public awareness campaign to generate widespread interest before presenting the report and the perspectives of racialized artists to the City of Montreal.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Creating spaces for community solidarity and collective healing
These teams are working towards improved community well-being through carving out spaces for marginalized groups to gather and feel united in taking care of one another. By building stronger networks of solidarity as well as individual capacity, these groups aim to build self-determination on the path to healing.
Black Healing Centre
The Black Healing Centre aims to design intergenerational programming that reimagines healing. Their current project supported by SHIFT is the Community Care Practitioner Program in collaboration with Dr. Lisa Ndejuru (Applied Human Sciences). The project aims to help expand the pool of Black practitioners serving Montreal's Black communities and provide a peer support space for practitioners navigating the lines between colonized and cultural mental health practice.
Total SHIFT funding received: $55,000
Kapwa Centre
“Kapwa is an inner sense of interconnectedness we share as human beings”. The Centre Kapwa is a by-and-for organization that serves and supports Montreal Filipinx youth and their families and works to unite the diaspora through art, movement and conversations. The organization was first funded by SHIFT for “Kapwa Rising,” a conference to “unlearn, unite, and uplift” the community in the face of anti-Asian racism.
Total SHIFT funding received: $17,000
Collectif Comm-Un
Comm-Un is a collective that aims to combat the profound injustice facing Indigenous, Inuit, and other unhoused communities in Montreal’s Milton Park neighbourhood. With the purpose of guiding individuals from survival to leadership, the group seeks to highlight the complex social and environmental factors underlying the crisis, which stems from issues such as trauma, substance use and a fragmented support system.
Total SHIFT funding received: $20,000
Black Mental Health Connections
Black Mental Health Connections (BMHC) is an alliance of organizations and individuals focused on the mental health and well-being of the English-speaking Black community in Montreal. SHIFT supports BMHC’s Peer Support Groups project that connects participants to Black-specific resources, and facilitate the healing of traumas caused by ongoing systemic racism.
Total SHIFT funding received: $32,000
Buckskin Babes
The Buckskin Babes Urban Moosehide Tanning Collective focuses on the reclamation of cultural practices for urban Indigenous peoples living in Tiohtià: ke/Montreal. Buckskin Babes provides workshops and collaborates with other organizations like Batiment 7, and works under the guidance of Elders and Knowledge Keepers to facilitate traditional practices for and by Indigenous students.
Total SHIFT funding received: $15,000
Mossy Society
The Mossy Society is a collective of artists, largely based out of Concordia, working to create sustainable art initiatives that engage the community and build bridges across differences. They use art as a tool to amplify the voices and experiences of the unhoused Inuit community in the Milton-Parc neighbourhood.
SHIFT Funding Received: $15,000
Amal Centre for Women
The Amal Center for Women provides multilingual, culturally sensitive psychosocial services to Muslim women and their families across Montreal. This included video capsules in a variety of languages that aimed to break down barriers to essential services, as well as development of a toolkit on training and mentorship for Muslim women who provide informal support to their peers during disclosures of gender-based violence.
Total SHIFT funding received: $24,000
Collective for Social Change in Black Communities
This action research initiative between the Quebec Board of Black Educators (QBBE), its community partners and Concordia's Centre for Human Relations and Community Studies (CHRCS) aims to move existing Black community partnerships from an ad hoc, informal group to a value-generating network to address systemic discrimination.
Total SHIFT funding received: $15,000
Project 10
To combat the isolation experienced by 2SLBGTQIA+ youth during the COVID-19 pandemic, Project 10 received funding from SHIFT for a project that would connect specifically trans and non-binary youth to one another through virtual meet-ups and workshops, while also providing access health and wellness information provided by a network of community members. They would also become connected to essential resources like gender affirming gear, and legal support for name changing.
Total SHIFT funding received: $10,000
NDG Art Hive (HLM Project)
The NDG Art Hive is an open art studio where weekly workshops are held for tenants living in the four HLMs of NDG. The project aims to break the social isolation experienced by seniors and marginalized families and encourage participants to organize activities among themselves.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Center for Gender Advocacy
The Center for Gender Advocacy received funding from SHIFT for Rooting for Each Other, a project which built on the Center’s long history of offering peer-support services in their community. By providing programming based on creative and collective experiences rather than medicalization, the project aimed to challenge the idea that mental health can only be addressed in clinical spaces.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
DINAH Mission
The Diaspora Intervention Network of Awareness and Healing (DINAH) Mission works to systematically break down taboos surrounding childhood sexual trauma in Montreal Black communities, provide resources to assist with self-healing, and expand conversations around systemic deprioritization of Black mental health needs.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Working with and within institutions to create change
These groups and organizations are taking on institutions directly in an effort to reshape them. They work toward social transformation by partnering with institutions, creating resources to help community members navigate opaque systems, and embedding themselves inside failing or inadequate services.
enuf Canada
enuf was first funded in 2019 under the name Waste Not, Want Not, a project aimed at increasing composting habits on Concordia campus. Enuf has since grown into a large-scale social enterprise that helps organizations tackle the waste crisis through popular education initiatives, waste audits, and employing their “Green Brigades” to ensure proper waste disposal practices at events like Just for Laughs.
Total SHIFT funding received: $24,000
Concordia Precious Plastics Project (CP3)
Led by a multi-disciplinary team of students, CP3 partners with key actors from around the university to transform the plastic waste management system at Concordia. Through research, public awareness campaigns, and the implementation of a new recycling process, they aim to develop a replicable model to tackle the global plastic crisis.
Total SHIFT funding received: $12,000
Concordia Arts in Health Centre
The Concordia Arts in Health Centre (CAiHC) provides accessible, research-based Creative Arts Therapies (CATs) services to the public both on campus and inter-university and community partners. CAiHC creates placement opportunities for student interns to provide accessible, inclusive, and respectful arts therapies to clients of all ages.
Total SHIFT funding received: $15,000
Logifem
Logifem aims to demonstrate that a gender-informed approach to housing can better support women to permanently exit the cycle of homelessness. By leveraging strong connections between diverse stakeholders, fostered by the JMSB Community Service Initiative Roundtable, to adapt each aspect of this project to the community’s specific needs.
Total SHIFT funding received: $40,000
Community-University Research Exchange
The Community-University Research Exchange (CURE) receives support from SHIFT for “Estran,” a new project aiming to create an open online platform for trans persons across Quebec trying to access healthcare services. Estran will build a coalition of trans-led organizations in Quebec to develop best practices for practitioners that will be included in listings of healthcare practitioners.
Total SHIFT funding received: $17,000
Welcome Haven
The Welcome Haven, made up of a group of researchers at McGill University in partnership with community organizations, provides psychosocial support for newly arrived refugee claimants. They provide a range of supportive resources that decrease resettlement stressors, advocating for increased access to resources, and creating connections and sense of belonging for refugee claimant families.
Total SHIFT funding received: $17,000
Sex [M]Ed
Sex [M]Ed, a team of trained and practicing healthcare professionals, aims to fill gaps in the current medical education system by developing comprehensive training materials and workshops to increase Quebec’s health practitioners’ capacity to appropriately support and care for 2SLGBTQIA+ folks. Sex[M]ed's partnerships include Treat it Queer, SIECCAN and the Centre for Gender Advocacy at Concordia University.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Alliance for Community Adaptation
The ACDPN works to build up a stronger Black community across Montreal through the development of a network of organizations working towards resource development, capacity building, advocacy, and best practices sharing. This project aims to design an intervention toolkit for families and staff supporting Black children experiencing developmental or behavioral difficulties and possible autism spectrum disorders.
Total SHIFT funding received: $30,000
The Lavender Collective
The Lavender Collective advocates for culturally relevant mental health services for racialized communities. They received funding for their collaboration with the Black Perspectives Office at Concordia University to expand and promote their online database of racialized mental health professionals, to support racialized students and community members in accessing mental health services adapted to their needs and experiences
Total SHIFT funding received: $10,000
Culture Change in Long-term Care
This project, a collaboration between Seniors Action Quebec and Recreotherapy, engaged the people across sectors online through a virtual summit, and other knowledge dissemination activities around to build an intergenerational movement towards a culture for elders built on dignity.
Total SHIFT funding received: $10,000
Decolonial Perspectives and Practices Hub
The DPP Hub was a project collaboration between several graduate students and faculty at Concordia University, aiming to transform racist, heteronormative, and colonial biases in higher education by celebrating and promoting the contributions of QTBIPOC communities (Queer, Trans*, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour).
Total SHIFT funding received: $40,000
Concordia Walls to Bridges Program
Concordia Walls to Bridges united a team of faculty members and graduate students, with strong ties to Montreal-based Indigenous community organisations and the prison abolition movement, to host a training led by formerly incarcerated leaders from the successful Walls to Bridges program in Ontario.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Transformative Responses to COVID-19
With the COVID-19 pandemic came increased isolation and potential risk for Montrealers already experiencing marginalization and vulnerability. As part of SHIFT’s Transformative Responses Fund, these groups and organizations addressed that isolation head-on through neighbourhood solidarity and mutual aid networks.
Grocery Response NDG
Led by the Ageing+Communication+Technologies project at Concordia, the CIUSSS du Centre-Ouest-de-l'Ile-de-Montreal, and the New Hope Senior Citizens' Centre, in collaboration with NDG Senior Citizens' Council and Concordia University, this project worked to build a "low-tech," person-centred ordering system for seniors who experienced multiple forms of marginalization during the pandemic. The team used this project as an opportunity to highlight systemic issues facing seniors and conduct research.
SHIFT funding received: $5000
NDG Cares
NDG Cares was a resident-led solidarity project to design a community garden that enabled members of the socially and geographically isolated St Raymond’s neighbourhood to build community, beautify their own green spaces and grow their own food. Led by Habitations Communautaire Notre-Dame-de-Grace, the project served as a connection point during - and in response to - the COVID-19 pandemic. It provided training and leadership opportunities for residents to build skills around urban agriculture.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Collective Thread / Fil Collectif
Building from a resident-led mutual aid group, this project provided Parc Extension mothers with the tools and materials needed to start small businesses producing reusable masks. In addition to creating opportunities for at-home, paid work for marginalized women, distributing the masks in the neighbourhood through local community organisations worked to increase the health and safety risks of low-income residents.
Total SHIFT funding received: $5000
Women on the Rise
Women on the Rise's project "Time to Connect" provided access to free internet access for low-income single mothers, connecting them to one another throughout this period of confinement and helping them to continue accessing information and essential services.
Total SHIFT funding received: $3000
Marché Commun
A collaboration between Outremont COVID-19 Help Foundation and Sur Place Media, to offer emergency delivery services to seniors during the pandemic, and to create a non-profit or cooperative delivery service that prioritizes workers' rights and the needs of local businesses.
Total SHIFT funding received: $3000
