Kim, volunteer on Project Genesis’ Housing Rights and Anti-Poverty committees
“The most important way of fighting poverty is by fighting for housing.”
“When I first came to Project Genesis I had problems with housing. My building was sold and the new owner wanted to increase the rent by $20/month. Which maybe to her was a small amount but for me it was a big amount; at that time I had lost my job so I was already sacrificing a lot to pay the rent. When I lost my job I became a poor person. When I went to the CLE I was treated badly. That made me upset so I wanted to get involved in an organization that fights poverty.
When I worked, I realized that most of my salary went to pay rent. This is why for me, the most important thing is social housing. This motivates me to participate in supporting social housing, when I have time. If there’s no social housing, when people lose their jobs it’s very easy to become homeless.
Last year, I went to the FRAPRU Congress. Many different groups participated and helped me to know that many different kinds of people need social housing. The FRAPRU is very well organized and has done a lot to tell the government that social housing is important. Each group that attended had a chance to participate in the decisions. That’s democracy to me. With the FRAPRU, we get together to be a big group and that makes us stronger. We also got some outcomes this year – the federal government accepted to fund social housing (through the Accès-Logis program) for two years more. We’ll continue to fight for this and maybe after two years, they’ll continue the program.
The most important way of fighting poverty is by fighting for housing.”
Kim, volunteer on Project Genesis’ Housing Rights and Anti-Poverty committees
