Friends,
As MPs gather for self-congratulatory BBQs, we remain busy on a number of projects to stop deportations, win entry permits for Afghan refugees, push the Canadian government to end its “None is Too Many” policies preventing the evacuation of Palestinian Canadians’ loved ones from Gaza, repatriate 20 Canadian men, women & children held under conditions akin to torture in Syria, and supporting those wrongfully forced behind bars because they are Indigenous or women who have chosen to survive against male violence. As always we remain committed to transforming our war economy into one that meets human needs.
This is our daily work, and we put our hearts into it. So much so that we rarely find the time to fundraise. We survive on a shoestring, but the shoestring in 2024 is stretched thin and frazzled.
Our caseloads are higher than they have ever been, and our all-consuming campaign work is exhausting our limited resources. Despite its lofty rhetoric, the federal government continues to perpetuate misery for far too many.
This is why we are sending out this rare mid-summer appeal for your financial assistance to help us keep going.
For over 25 years, the Homes not Bombs campaigns have been an indispensable bulwark against state-sponsored injustices.
Our Women Who Choose to Live campaign supports women criminalized because they defended themselves against male violence.
The Rural Refugee Rights Network pursues creative strategies to open more doors for those fleeing violence and persecution while preventing the detention and deportation of those who have every right to stay. The Anne Frank Sanctuary Committee opens safe spaces for those being forced back to situations of grave danger.
The Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture campaign has taken a lead role in confronting Canada’s shocking complicity in the arbitrary detention and torture of 20 Canadians illegally detained for years without charge in Northeast Syria (32 have been brought back due to intense campaigning), while continuing its work to end secret trials and deportations to torture of security certificate detainees.
Homes not Bombs has always worked to eliminate the roots of institutional and interpersonal violence through education, nonviolent direct action, and accompaniment with the most vulnerable. For many years, that has meant focusing on creative means of ending Canada's contribution to global inequality and violence (an insidious combination that includes massive Canadian corporate investment in the Global South accompanied by the production and sales of weapons to "protect" those investments and maintain global inequality.)
Much of our work has sought to transform the institutions that create displacement while we work directly with the displaced – refugees fleeing violence, women and kids fleeing male violence in the home, Indigenous land and water defenders facing the ongoing dispossession of their lands, and the disproportionate numbers of Indigenous people caged in Canadian prisons.
We are a modest outfit that makes a big difference through education, solidarity, and direct action. With your support, we can continue doing so.
We hope you can consider a donation to get us through to the end of what will remain a very busy year. You can send an etransfer to tasc@web.ca or mail a cheque to Homes not Bombs at 2583 Carling Avenue, Unit M052, Ottawa, ON K2B 7H7.
Thanks as always for your support. We promise to stay in trouble – good trouble!
Peace
Matthew Behrens
Homes not Bombs
PS: The picture below is of my mother, Deborah Cass, a troublemaker and brilliant performer (here at the Stratford Festival in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1960) who would approve of this appeal. There is so much rich language in Shakespeare, and I share this quote from that play since it reminds me of the work that we do: dreaming and then creating things that we have been told are illegal, impossible, impractical. But we know better. Which is why we keep going on.
“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”
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