Here is a photo of a billboard from the 1920s in the Town of Aurora, my home town. What I love about this photo is that the welcome sign in the shape of a book, quite different from the simple rectangular signs we see today. It gives me a warm and comforting feeling as if entering a story book –the feeling of home.

Hi there, welcome to my blog! My name is Nicole and I am so excited to be starting a blog. (I hope you get the title reference btw). This is a space where I will be exploring various topics relating to social justice in the city of Toronto.

To start with a little about myself, I am Korean-Canadian and I grew up in various areas in the York Region but mainly in Aurora. Coming from a smaller town, attending a small high school, I was quite excited to move to closer to the bright and busy city.

This course looks at that bright and busy city, both examining the good and not so good sides. An issue I am interested in exploring further in particular is homelessness in Toronto. As little kids we always hear the “there are people dying in Africa” line from our parents, ushering us to finish up the last bit of food we left on our plates – in my case the beans that I would detest having eat. Hearing this line engraved in me this idea that Canada, being a first world country, was not like countries in Africa where people would go to bed hungry. Soon, very soon, I realized the reality of homelessness in Canada.

This became a topic of interest quickly and I started to volunteer for various organizations throughout high school such as Hand Up Toronto, one that hands out lunches to the homeless population in Moss Park. Though filling hungry stomachs is something that we ought to do and something I loved doing, there was always part of me that felt that more needed to be done to actually help these people. I wanted solutions that were not just band-aid solutions. It also got me wondering about how we could remove public prejudice about homeless people, in the face of Canada’s strong neo-liberal ideologies.

These are all questions that I have yet to answer, and I hope that through this course I will be able to explore, research, and learn about the issues that Canadians are facing everyday.

The older I get, I only come to realize the intensity of the numerous social issues that exist not just in Canada but really all around the world, whether that is homelessness as aforementioned, human trafficking, racism, environmental issues or even addictions.

I want to inspire people (myself included) to become passionate, and hopeful about working towards a healthier, more equal, happier society, instead of feeling apathetic and fatalistic about the issues we are bombarded with online every single day. (let’s be real, how many times have you reposted to your story a post about some issue on instagram without actually reading up about it, or trying to find a way to help?)

I took INI101 to learn more about Toronto, story-telling, and how to effectively address social justice issues. I hope that through this 12 week journey I will be equipped with the tools and skills I need to communicate to people about social issues and why we should care about them.

Anyways, thank you for reading this post and I’ll see you in the next blog post! 🙂