Once upon a time, in a quaint little city very nearby, there were TWO COMMITTEES working on the development of Anti Black, Anti Racism Policies. One was under the umbrella of the CITY while the other was the purview of the LIBRARY. The two committees had similar aims which were to improve life in the quaint city in terms of equity and social fairness. The CITY committee is known as the Pickering Anti-Black Racism Taskforce, PABRT for short, while the LIBRARY committee is known as the Pickering Public Library Anti-Black and Racism Committee. PPL ABRCS.
PABRT
The Pickering Anti-Black Racism Taskforce, chaired by Jaclyn San Antonio, was launched a few years ago in 2020 with the goal of developing concrete strategies to combat Anti-Black and Racism in the community. The process is challenging and slow as its work has no precedence to use as guidelines. But the committee has launched some successful initiatives in the community.
The community has linked with the Durham Region Police Force via its Community Safety and Well-Being advisor, Elaine Knox. The consultation process has led to an increase in safe walking areas in the community, especially at night. The community link has also begun development to improve health services in the community. The work of this committee in this area is being done in phases as the the committee builds its knowledge and information base. It is scheduled for completion of its work in this area as sometime in 2024.
Additionally, the full committee has connected with the Durham Region Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee in order to widen its scope of concentration and broaden its endeavours.
Going beyond discussion, the committee has launched activities for the benefit of the community, Anti-Black Racism Workshops and the Black Joy Holiday Market. The invitation to join the workshops is forthcoming while the Black Joy Holiday Market is riding its first Christmas success of 2022 with a bigger and better encore in late November, 2023.
Because the scope of PABRT is so broad and aimed at the entire City, this committee’s work takes more time to develop working policies. Its volunteer members meet regularly and work with dedication toward the goal of establishing workable policies, strategies and actions to combat Anti Black and Racism in Pickering.
ANTI BLACK AND RACISM COMMITTEE, Pickering Public Library
The ABR committee of the Pickering Public Library differs drastically from the PABRT committee. Where the latter focuses specifically on affecting changes in the community itself, the library committee aims its work at the library itself with the community being its information resource. Though there is some collaboration between the two committees, it is limited more to communication and information exchange rather than duplicating policies and activities.
The library committee is dedicated to affecting change within the library, changes that are reflections of the community. The committee undertakes consultation with community groups to ascertain the issues relating to Anti-Black and Racism problems in the City. The committee then assesses its internal areas of concern: surveillance, equity, borrowing, collections, connections with the community, identification of the community factions, and the history therein. The committee launched in 2020 as well, aims to learn and assess the pulse of the community in order to modify and update its collections, events, and activities making them more in line with the community demographic.
The goal of the library committee is to make the Pickering Public Library more informed about the community and improve library policies to better reflect the community and react more closely to it. In this regard of the community being dynamic, constantly undergoing change, the library committee has no timelines or hard fast goals. This committee sees its work as an ongoing process constantly in flux to better reflect the changes in its surrounding community.
The library committee has an excellent and very comprehensive publication of its information at the library website: https://pickeringlibrary.ca/abrwg/. The information ranges from its working group membership to meeting information, from inviting the public to propose event suggestions to publishing job opportunities. Currently, Chairperson Stephen Linton works with nearly a dozen volunteers as they develop library policies better aligned with the City of Pickering.
Both committees are dedicated teams working to improve living in this quaint little city of Pickering. We wish them well in their endeavours.
