We are pleased to announce the hiring of Zachary Grant as our new Community Director. This is the next step in our ongoing process of change. He’ll be helping us realize some next steps over the coming months.
Zachary will start July 15. All those of us who have met him are really excited about starting this new era together with him. Once he starts, there will be a series of “cottage meetings” to allow everyone to meet him in a more intimate context. He will be at church some weeks and preach from time to time, but will not be there every week.
A brief biography follows…
Zachary Grant was born in a small farming community in southern Ontario on the Nith River and the Traditional Territories of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Mississauga Nations; where he grew up in the rural Lutheran church, among its quilting bees, pancake dinners and harvest festivals. For more than a decade, he has worked to bring these ways of knowing and seeing our responsibility of togetherness, and to community, from this early place. In this, the hope to fill our action and organizing with celebration, love and honesty.
His work has grown through years of embedded practice in communities living and impacted by HIV/AIDS, People who use drugs, Prisoners, Migrants and many others across Ontario and Quebec to form resilient, cooperative, participatory communities of care. He has spent much of this time facilitating ritual alongside communities and community leaders around loss and grief, releasing and healing trauma, developing narrative, deepening relationships, and creating moments of transformation and change. He has additionally spent the past several years supporting numerous organizations and committees across the Great Lakes region developing their capacity to make good action, to work through growth or change, and finding meaning and stability within their work. He provides holistic supervision and counselling for teams at the WORKS Overdose Prevention site, Reseau Access Sudbury and Individually for various community practitioners working through the impact of the ongoing drug poisoning crisis.
