The One Love Gala
As many of my friends know, my dad works in corrections as a chaplain in maximum-security prisons across Canada. He is one of the longest-serving Muslim chaplains in the Canadian prison system. In 2012, the federal government cancelled the contracts of part-time prison chaplains, most of whom served minority faiths. (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.
Many of the people my dad has supported personally have also attended the gala over the years. In particular, this year we were honoured with the presence of Joey Twins, an Indigenous woman who has said she was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1979, who was shackled and strip-searched by an all-male emergency response team during the 1994 incident at Kingston’s Prison for Women, 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.
By the numbers
Less than 5%
of women in Canada are Indigenous.
Nearly 50%
of federally sentenced women are Indigenous (statistic updated 2021).
Source: Office of the Correctional Investigator, “Proportion of Indigenous Women in Federal Custody Nears 50%,” December 17, 2021.
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.
He is incredibly passionate in fighting to give people who have been caught in the system a second chance at a better life.
A legacy to live up to
How am I supposed to live up to this same legacy and sense of purpose my dad has always seemed to have? Like many community builders, 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.
I love the gala, and I’ve seen it from the inside. Each year I run one of the jobs that makes or breaks the night: registration, ticketing and sponsorship donations. That vantage point has taught me as much about community organizing as any classroom.
Behind the scenes: ticketing
Ticketing is the challenge we come back to every year. Most of our tickets are still sold on paper and at the door, which makes pricing hard to hold: guests arrive dressed for the evening, sometimes hoping for a discount, and you can’t turn anyone away. I’ve long argued for moving sales online so the price is settled before anyone walks in. My dad sees it differently. For him, flexibility at the door is part of how you fill a room, and with 300–400 guests of different faiths and backgrounds most years, it’s hard to argue the event isn’t working. The real question for us is how to modernize the process without losing the personal, community-first approach that makes people show up in the first place.
Catering to your community
The lesson I keep coming back to is about catering to your community. If I am to look at the turnout 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 mostly buys their tickets in person, the way this community has always done it, while Category B mostly buys their tickets online.
Aside from ticketing, each year we also deal with smaller subtleties such as enforcing a formal dress code for the event (which often falls apart), welcoming an audience that may be new to 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.
It’s a lot to juggle at once, but like other community builders have made clear, assimilating the community in attempts to be Canadian is wholly un-Canadian. There is a great deal of irony in promoting an all-inclusive event where we often have the attendance of Russian, Indian, Arab, Chinese, Sierra Leonean, Guyanese, Jamaican (and everything else in between) guests but still trying to enforce a formal (often European-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 many older guests are not yet comfortable purchasing tickets on an online platform.
This implicit pressure to assimilate is something that I will constantly have to train myself to rethink, as it is crucial for me to cater to my community and leave 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.
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