Lubna Alli

As many of my friends know, my dad works in corrections as a chaplain in maximum-security prisons across Canada. He is the longest-serving Muslim chaplain in the entirety of the Canadian prison system. In 2012, the federal government cancelled the contracts of part-time prison chaplains, effectively eliminating non-Christian staff. (This has since changed). To make a point, each year my dad puts together the One Love Gala dinner to raise funds and awareness about the importance of the successful reintegration of inmates into society, this past Saturday’s gala being the 7th.

Some of the inmates that my dad has helped personally (and that have also attended the gala) include local Toronto rappers signed to Drake’s OVO, a fact that always get my friends excited. In particular, this year we were honoured with the presence of Joey Twins, an Indigenous woman who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1979, involved in the notorious Kingston prison riot of 1994 where she was shackled and strip-searched by an all-male emergency response team, and who has survived the emotional, mental, physical, and sexual torture of residential schools. Joey was the recipient of the Lyla Ali Education and Community Service Award, which was created in honour of my late grandmother Lyla Ali, who was a single mother that strove to educate others, and who dedicated countless hours towards improving her community.

In previous years, Omar Khadr, who made headlines for being detained and held in Guantanamo Bay for some 10 years has also attended. My dad is tireless in the work that he does and he is incredibly passionate in fighting to give people who have been caught in the system a second chance at a better life. That’s the kicker.

How am I supposed to live up to this same legacy and sense of purpose my dad has always seemed to have? Like Minaz and Nasma, my dad also found his career through this winding path of taking opportunities as they came knocking in order to get to where he is today. Perhaps I’m also on this same winding trajectory without even realizing it.

Despite how much I relish the gala each year, as someone who puts in the blood, sweat, and tears behind the scenes, I also become frustrated at times. Both with my dad and with the event. Each year I am responsible for one of the most crucial jobs to run the event successfully: registration, ticketing handling and sponsorship donations.

No matter how many times our team discusses improvements for the following year, each event still suffers from poor ticket handling, namely because of the old school style in which it is still done. I’m an advocate for online ticket sales only to prevent swindling at the door – one of the biggest problems we deal with. People never want to pay full price, each inciting their own reasons as to why they are the exception to the rule. Once they arrive all dressed up, you can’t turn them away, but you also can’t be a pushover. How to handle this gracefully has always been my demise. My principle is that if you truly want to support the cause, then you wouldn’t haggle the ticket cost. My dad, on the other hand, justifies it as necessary to get the numbers for the event. Generally speaking, the event does well; most years the banquet hall is filled with 300-400 people of different religions, ethnicities, and statures, so I don’t whether to attribute it to my dad’s old school paper ticketing style or to actual interest in the event.

Like my dad, Minhaz also touched on this very issue in her presentation, as did Sabeena Ali with the tandoor grills. The main takeaway I got from her presentation was about catering to your community. If I am to look at the turn out for the One Love Gala event, then the results would show that the turnout fits into two main categories: a) Guyanese friends and family who have always been coming to my dad’s various events over the years, b) fellow correctional services chaplains, colleagues, inmates (and their respective friends and family). Category A is usually the largest turnout, encompassing about 75% of the event’s attendance, while Category B is the second largest turnout, usually encompassing the remaining 25%. Category A (the older, brown folk) buys their tickets the old school way, through physical, in-person ticket sales, and Category B (the younger, often white folk) buys their tickets online at full price.

Aside from ticketing, each year we also deal with smaller subtleties such as enforcing a formal dress code for the event (which often goes to shit), dealing with an audience that may not know how to appreciate other cultures respective to expected societal norms, and finding a balance between catering to the predominant Guyanese and Muslim crowd while maintaining a nondenominational, Canadian undertone to an event that aims to promote diversity and inclusion.

Its a lot to juggle at once, but like other community builders have made clear, whiteifying the community in attempts to be Canadian is wholly un-Canadian. There is a shit ton of irony in promoting an all-inclusive event where we often have the attendance of Russian, Indian, Arab, Chinese, Sierra Leonian, Guyanese, Jamaican (and everything else in between) but still trying to enforce a formal (often Eurpoean-esque in expectation) dress code. The same applies to ticket sales, where the community is used to functioning in a way of in-person ticket sales. If we were to switch the ticketing system to solely online, then we risk losing a large portion of our sales, especially because older folks are still not tech savvy enough to purchase tickets on an online platform.

This implicit whitefying is something that I will constantly have to train myself to rethink, as it crucial for me to cater to my community and leaves all prejudice and bias at the door in order to wholly do my job well. These are the checks I always need to do with myself in order to ensure that I am constantly growing, evolving and bettering myself.