A Community Call to Action on our RIGHT TO HOUSING

Date: November 18, 2026

Time: 5pm to 8pm

Location: The 519 Community Centre [519 Church St] -> Wellsley is the closet TTC station

RSVP appreciated but not required. Use this link to register and let us know of your accessibility needs.

Details:

Join us ahead of the National Housing Day to learn more about the fight for housing affordability and our right to housing. The event will bring together grassroots housing advocates, community leaders, and housing professionals for an engaging conversation about the current housing landscape, with a focus on housing affordability, accessibility, development, and the right to housing.

Following the panel, we will have an interactive activity to identify key housing priorities and develop clear advocacy demands for city officials.

Feedback and priorities gathered during the session will be synthesized into a People’s Housing Platform, designed to support informed resident decision-making ahead of the upcoming City Council and Mayoral elections.

We look forward to bringing our community together for this important conversation and to building a stronger collective vision for housing justice.

Meet your facilitators:

Martha Singh-Jennings
Martha is The 519’s Director of Housing Advocacy and Support Services. They have been working in solidarity with marginalized communities for over a decade in Canada, the UK, and internationally, with a particular focus on women, trans, and non-binary persons, and those experiencing displacement and racialization. Martha will be speaking about The 519’s Housing Justice paper and the barriers and vulnerabilities 2SLGBTQ+ people face all along the housing continuum.
 Abram Braithewaite, Toronto Tenant Union
The Toronto Tenant Union (TTU) is a citywide organization of tenants and tenant associations in Toronto, Ontario. TTU is dedicated to protecting our homes from landlords and their allies, by organizing with our neighbours and providing them with the skills necessary to fight and win the right to live in affordable, clean and safe housing in the communities we call home.Together, we’re building a collective force that can stand up to rising rents, push back against unfair treatment, and demand the housing justice Torontonians deserve. Join us to step into something bigger and help shape a movement that refuses to be ignored.

The Toronto Underhoused and Homeless Union (TUHU) helps us go from feeling powerless in the system to finding our power and collective voice. We are people living in shelters, encampments, insecure rentals, and social housing. And together we build leadership in our communities, and organize around issues that matter to us. Our union builds unity, support, and community for homeless and housing insecure people. We come together, learn from one another, and build our capacity to make change.

Aliah El-houni is a social justice lawyer and legal educator. Her work has focused on advancing the rights of poor, working-class, and equity-seeking communities, with particular expertise in housing, criminal, quasi-criminal, and prison law.  Aliah was a founding Co-Director and Staff Lawyer at the Community Justice Collective (CJC), Toronto’s first movement lawyering organization, providing pro bono legal support to organized communities and activists. There she developed a broad, community-based trial and appeal practice representing tenants, unhoused people, First Nations land defenders, workers, protestors, and student groups across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. She is currently the lead housing lawyer at the Toronto Metropolitan University Law School’s community legal clinic.