Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

This grant request is to fund the costs associated with a two-day knowledge mobilization event to a) showcase and critically assess the key knowledge translation tool emerging from our Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship and b) discuss changes needed in light of two concurrent developments that are impacting the mobilization of sex workers in Canada, particularly those with intersecting vulnerabilities, around their health and safety. We plan to hold the event in Victoria, BC on March 18 & 19, 2023. A Lekwungen Knowledge Keeper will welcome all attendees (approximately 30 persons) and give our land acknowledgment. The first day will involve a national workshop opened by a keynote co-presentation from Indigenous scholar, Dr. Sarah Hunt, and an Indigenous community leader. This will be followed by a critical assessment of our bi-lingual draft intervention tool developed to advance sex workers' social justice and health equity - the Sex Workers' Activist School Facilitation Guide. The mobilization tool has been co-developed by members of seven sex worker organizations from across Canada and, to date, piloted in five communities. Day Two will involve an overview by a member of the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform relating to the constitutional challenge to Canada's prostitution laws and presentations by four experts from Canada and New Zealand. The experts will analyze the importance of the mobilization project in the context of the need for sex workers to organize. The symposium will be open to participants from the sex work community, social and mainstream media, allied community partners, and health and social policy-makers. A finalized version of the bi-lingual training intervention tool will be shared with other sex workers organizations.