📍 MCC Toronto Social Hall (115 Simpson Ave.)
📅 Wednesday, June 17
⏰ 6 PM
🎟️ Free for All
Fully accessible and safe space for 2SLGBTQIA+ folks and allies

Join our guest speakers for Proud Voices: Queer Love and Global Solidarity, an evening of storytelling and conversation exploring the progress made in advancing 2SLGBTQ+ rights and the ongoing challenges faced by LGBTQ+ communities around the world. Together, we will reflect on resilience, advocacy, and the work that still lies ahead.

REGISTER

Francois Zankih (he/him)

Founder of Syria’s first LGBTQ+ organization, Guardians of Equality Movement (GEM). Francois brings lived experience as a queer refugee and survivor of persecution, highlighting the realities of displacement, safety, resilience, and the ongoing need for global solidarity.

Ben Rowswell (he/him)

Ben Rowswell is a human rights activist, now on the board of directors of MCC. As a Canadian diplomat for 25 years, he worked in Canada’s embassies in Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan before serving as Representative of Canada in Kandahar from 2009 to 2010 and as Ambassador to Venezuela from 2014 to 2017. He began his career in activism as a startup cofounder building software inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, then led the Canadian International Council to engage Canadians on foreign policy.

Shaken by the discovery of the graves of children who died in residential schools, he founded the Remembering Project. Now a project of the Paul Austin Centre for Human Rights, this project invites non-Indigenous Canadians to help survivors in their search for missing children from residential schools across northern Ontario.