LAMP Community Health Centre leads efforts to dismantle anti-Black racism

Systemic anti-Black racism is a pervasive issue in health care. A 2017 report from the City of Toronto outlines that Black Torontonians often experience ‘service deserts’ in their neighbourhoods and – when health and community services are available – many Black residents report the services are inadequate in meeting their needs.

Keddone Dias, Executive Director of LAMP Community Health Centre (CHC), has been leading efforts to address anti-Black racism with her team at LAMP CHC and by collaborating with service providers in the West Toronto and Mississauga Ontario Health Teams (OHTs). Keddone joined us to talk about this work and the importance of partnership to build sustainable change.

This is a two-part series, with the first part focused on the work underway at LAMP CHC. Next week, we will post part two about Keddone’s collaboration with other health and community care partners to address anti-Black racism.

Tell us about how you came to this work.

Health equity has been an important part of our work at LAMP CHC for many years. For example, we introduced anti-oppression training as part of our annual education for staff nearly ten years ago.

With all that happened in 2020 around the George Floyd murder and the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, I knew we needed go beyond the broad focus of anti-oppression. We needed to name anti-Black racism and be intentional about how we how we work on it at LAMP CHC.

How did LAMP Community Health Centre (CHC) begin to move anti-Black racism efforts forward?

We started out by doing several anti-Black racism surveys within the organization. Through the surveys, we identified a lack of training for our staff. We worked with the facilitator who does our anti-oppression training to develop our own training series on anti-Black racism. We are now in our third round of the training series with our staff.

We struck a committee to work on anti-racism. The anti-Black racism surveys have helped to guide the committee recommendations. The committee also explored the 94 Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and identified the ones that are relevant to our work.

Over the course of five months, our committee and our board members have developed a statement of commitment on how LAMP CHC will act to disrupt the cycle of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. Out of this statement, we finalized our action plan – how we engage staff, how we engage our board and how we are accountable to our community.

We have also developed what we call our ‘anti-hate space’ to address other health equity issues that are happening around us, including anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Asian hate and Islamophobia. We hold time for our staff to come together and talk about how they are carrying some of the weight of these traumas. The goal is to support them and help them know that they are not alone.

Why the specific focus on anti-Black racism?

Unfortunately there is no shortage of health equity problems that we could take on. In terms of starting with anti-Black racism, we've seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic how Black communities have been disproportionately impacted. This is because of the underlying health and social inequities that contribute to poor health outcomes for Black people.

These issues are long standing and pervasive. It's important for us to take a stand and address anti-Black racism in health.

This is not to minimize any other health equity issues and our hope is that our work in this area will take us further in addressing broader health inequities in our communities.

What inspires you to help address anti-Black racism?

It’s work I’ve always done because it’s always been important. The issues related to anti-Black racism have become more visible and mainstream, but it's always been visible to me in my work in the community.

For me, it wasn't necessarily a question of, ‘Should I start working on this?’ Instead, it was a question of, ‘How do I continue to work on this? And what does it need to look like today compared to 10 years ago?’

Stay tuned next week for part two where we continue the conversation with Keddone on anti-Black racism efforts taking place with health and community care partners in West Toronto, Mississauga and across the Toronto Region.

Note: Answers in this article were condensed and edited for clarity.

Special acknowledgement: The following individuals have had a critical role in advancing the anti-Black racism work outlined in this article:

• Jenell Austin

• Tanzina Islam

• LAMP Anti-Black Racism Committee, staff and Board of Directors

WTOHTFebruary 24, 2022