ACTIVIST AT REST
Bonnie Briggs, respected Toronto housing advocate, passed away Friday at age 64,
The woman who first suggested Toronto needs a standing memorial for homeless people who die on its streets was honoured at the memorial Tuesday.
Bonnie Briggs, a housing activist and poet who was 64, died suddenly on Friday at her Parkdale home.
Formerly homeless herself, Briggs was loved by people fighting homelessness and poverty in the city, who saw her and her husband, Kerre Briggs, join years of meetings, rallies, marches and memorials on homelessness or housing.
“You worked harder than anyone I know to end homelessness,” Cathy Crowe, a fellow activist and street nurse, wrote to Briggs on Saturday. The Brampton-born woman got the idea for a memorial in the late 1980s while in St. James Park, a downtown green space where, then as now, many homeless people stay.
She had been to Toronto City Hall and saw it had memorials to firefighters, police and other people who died on the job.
Why not have one for the homeless, too?
The first names started to grace the memorial in 1997.
“We never dreamed that there would be 850 names on it, and it would still be up 20 years later,” Kerre said on Sunday. “We thought the government would get off its ass.”
At first, Briggs wanted the memorial at the park, but Kerre believed it’s now perfectly situated at Church of the Holy Trinity, beside the Eaton Centre. The memorial, he said, is a tombstone, “a glaring reminder” that citizens and their governments haven’t done enough.
“We’re too polite,” Kerre said. “We don’t have the public will we used to have.”
Kerre was homeless five times; Bonnie was homeless with him twice, in 1987 and 1989.
Vacancies in the city were scarce. Kerre had a full-time warehouse job in 1987, but their landlord sold their apartment to a buyer who wanted a whole house for himself.
They landed on the street, sleeping in parked cars and stairwells, sometimes living in cheap motels. Crowe wrote about them in a book, Dying for a Home.
Bonnie lived in Maple when they met at a dance in Kleinburg in 1982. She was wearing “kind of a granny gown” and looked “totally different from anybody else there,” Kerre said.
By October, they were living together. They stuck together, her husband said, because they had been through so much.
Privately, he said, Bonnie would bemoan things weren’t moving fast enough. Still, the couple kept speaking up publicly because they felt they had to.
Both felt the solutions to homelessness were right in front of people’s eyes — like the “tiny houses” of Trenton Terrace in Parkdale — or could be found in action in other places of the world. “But a lot of people didn’t listen to us,” Kerre said.
On Friday, Briggs and Kerre were home watching Jeopardy. Briggs had health problems and had a pacemaker installed four years ago. She dozed off and her head slumped over. Her skin went suddenly cold. She didn’t make it to a hospital.
News of Brigg’s death brought tributes from organizations for which she had worked, including Toronto ACORN, which praised her as an activist “known across the country.”
“She is an inspiration that will never be forgotten by ACORN” the advocacy group for low-income people said.