Pride T.O. seeks grant for police programs

Proposed project would address police discrimination toward LGBTQ communities of colour

Pride Toronto has applied for $135,000 in grants to help repair the LGBTQ community’s fractured relationship with police and tackle “institutional discrimination.” The organization has requested $75,000 from the Ontario Trillium Foundation and $60,000 from TD Bank, a long-time sponsor of annual Pride festivities, to fund the project Policing Queer Communities of Colour, according to Pride Toronto’s Trillium grant application obtained by the Star through a freedom of information request.

Funding from TD Bank, through it’s community program, is contingent on Pride Toronto receiving the grant from Trillium, a provincial agency, said executive director Olivia Nuamah. If successful, Pride Toronto will form a community-led working group tasked with developing local initiatives and making recommendations to Toronto Police Service to address “heteronormative biases,” the application said.

“We want to address the institutional and systemic barriers that lead to LGBTQ communities of colour experiencing the most negative outcomes from their interactions with the criminal justice system.”

This would be the first time Pride Toronto is undertaking a social policy initiative to help LGBTQ communities improve relations with police, Nuamah told the Star.

Nuamah said she expects to hear in July if Trillium has approved the application.

“We really are trying to implement real solutions so we have answers to the problems raised by the community. We are doing the thing we do best — getting people together to facilitate conversations,” she said. In the past, community groups and police have led initiatives to address LGBTQ issues, but these ended when participating organizations changed leadership, the application said.

This project would take place over five years, involve numerous organizations and focus on gathering much-needed evidence on how police biases harm LGBTQ communities of colour — an underresearched area, Pride Toronto said in its application.

Toronto police, which recently withdrew its application to march in this year’s Pride parade, said it already has been working with community organizations and will continue to do so.

Toronto police are “happy to work with anyone who comes to the table to address issues between police and LGBTQ communities, including communities of colour,” said spokesperson Meaghan Gray, noting police hadn’t seen the final grant application so could not comment specifically.

York University professor Carl James, who is not involved in the grant application process, said the success of the project would be contingent on Toronto police’s willingness to change, take initiative and not simply wait for Pride Toronto to come up with solutions.

“I look to police for their commitment to unpack police culture, what it represents and to start understanding the racial ways they approach communities,” said James, whose research focuses on racism, equity and social justice.

Pride Toronto began the application process last fall, prompted by Black Lives Matter protesting police involvement in the 2016 parade because of mistrust and “antiblack police violence,” its application said.

It held several town hall meetings where participants “spoke passionately about the bullying and harassment they suffer in their communities ... and the lack of support they felt in reporting it,” said Pride Toronto in a draft report to Trillium.

Pride Toronto’s application said it was also influenced by two other events in 2017 — Toronto District School Board removing police from its schools because of the “unsettling effect it had on students of colour” and the police service board setting up an anti-racism committee following the 2015 police shooting of Andrew Loku.

Pride Toronto filed its application before alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur was arrested Jan. 18, Nuamah said.

Police have since laid eight first-degree murder charges against McArthur. The majority of the victims were from the LGBTQ community, belonged to ethnic minorities and were reported missing to police years before.

These recent revelations “solidifies the importance” of a collaborative, long-term project, Nuamah said.

If Trillium approves the project, Pride Toronto can apply again in a few years for up to $500,000 per year for up to five years.

The last time Pride Toronto received Trillium funding was for World Pride 2014.

Last year. it ran a $500,000 spending deficit. This year, it expects to double its Pride festival revenue to almost $5 million and has applied to other grants to help cover its operating costs.