Action Blast: July 8, 2026
đź’Ą TAKE ACTION TODAY đź’Ą
🍉 Palestinian Football Exhibit 🍉
Save the date!
Palestinian Youth Movement presents for the first time, the Palestinian Football Exhibit. At a moment like this, we refuse to overlook the impact of institutions like FIFA on the Palestinian people while we highlight the cultural importance of football to our people beyond just a sport.
Join PYM on Saturday, July 18 and share widely!
đź’¸ Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction đź’¸
Let’s lift up what nationalism is tearing down. Indigenous harm reduction is resistance. Consider supporting Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction’s summer outreach and OD response.
Within the last couple weeks since the closures of SCS sites in the downtown east, we’ve continued to distribute water and survival supplies in addition to our regular engagement with community. As we check on our relatives outside we have encountered multiple OD’s. This is a community crisis that disproportionately impacts Indigenous people. Where everyday people are forced to respond to overdose because of the dismantling of public health care for PWUD. We acknowledge our relatives who are peers who use substances and SCS workers who have been doing this work since time. We will also continue to work collaboratively with grassroots harm reductionists in our community, radical healthcare workers and our Indigenous kin, and will to speak out publicly to raise awareness and address systemic failures of the so called canada to address this crisis. Harm reduction is political.
Your contributions will directly contribute to training, outreach, emergency and grief care for our relatives.
❣️‼️🪶 HOW YOU CAN HELP 🪶‼️❣️
Visit our registry to purchase survival items (shipping info is present and accurate)
E-transfer torontoindigenousHR@gmail.com
Miigwech!
đź“– More Actions and Resources đź’»
This is where we link to external content we found interesting, challenging, or thought-provoking this month. Our movements are stronger when we listen to, learn from, and collaborate with folks whose perspectives and approaches are different from ours. Inclusion here does not imply endorsement.
Act:
Tell FIFA & World Cup hosts: no fear, no crackdowns, no excuses. Attacks on rights and freedoms are turning a festival of joy into a festival of fear. Demand better. Tell FIFA President Gianni Infantino and host country authorities: make this a World Cup for everyone.
As we face record-setting heatwaves across Ontario, call on the government to ensure that everyone has access to a safe, cool environment in their own home by funding AC for all and introducing maximum temperature regulations for rental homes.
Imprisoned people also deserve to be safe from extreme heat, but most people warehoused in provincial-territorial jails and federal penitentiaries don’t have access to air conditioning in their cells or on their units. Call on prison authorities to ensure unrestricted access to cold drinking water and ice, regular access to air-conditioned zones or cooling stations, the distribution of free fans and other cooling devices, and increased access to health and mental health care.
RSVP for The River Run hosted by Grassy Narrows and Wabaseemoong First Nations. River Run 2026 will be on Wednesday, September 23 at noon. RSVP for yourself, and organize your friends, family, and work place to join in. Sign up for the newsletter to find out all the ways you can help out leading up to River Run 2026!
Attend:
July - September: Summer Practice School - community organizing skill workshops
July 9
Queer Cinema for Palestine - online screening
July 11
Black Youth: Food Sovereignty Future - community conversation
Mapping Extractive Frontiers in the Ring of Fire - screening & talk back
Know Your Immigration Rights - workshop
July 12
Counter-revolution in Egypt - book launch
Voices for Lebanon - fundraiser show
Know Your Immigration Rights - workshop
Shopner Mela (Festival of Dreams) - art, food, performances
July 15
NIMBYism and Housing Equity - speaker & discussion
Read:
Cancel Canada Day
Vanessa Smithers calls attention to what is missing from the narrative of Canadian history: “Happy Canada Day,” to a country that needs to learn how to tell the truth.
In the 1970s, a team of scientists descended on Igloolik. Funded by grants from the federal government, researchers from various universities conducted medical experiments, including grafting skin from one Inuk to another. Scar Tissue: The legacy of medical experimentation on Inuit in the Arctic.
The federal government has brought in major changes to how pesticides are regulated in Canada, granting cabinet the power to authorize their use — even pesticides Health Canada has deemed are unsafe.
FIFA Fouls
Thousands of volunteers help deliver the World Cup. Why is FIFA relying on unpaid positions? FIFA denies using unfair labour practices, but why has an organization with such extensive resources decided to use volunteers rather than paying people for those roles?
The Toronto Underhoused and Homeless Union interviewed people at Union Station experiencing homelessness about their experience with security violence in the lead-up to FIFA. Read about their findings in their report, Safety For Whom?
More than two years into a war in Gaza that has killed over 72,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, FIFA has yet to suspend Israel from a single competition. FIFA's silence on Israel is not neutrality, but a choice.
As part of Pivot’s “FIFA on the Block” Series, they discuss how, while climate change is disrupting the 2026 World Cup and exacerbating FIFA’s impacts on host city residents, FIFA is, in turn, driving us further and further into climatic crisis. FIFA on the Block: The Mega Event in an Era of Extreme Heat and Climatic Crisis.
Canada’s FIFA exclusion of Palestinians and Iranians reveals a lethal double standard. Canada says it’s inviting the world for the FIFA World Cup—but it’s acting more like a lapdog of the U.S. by shutting its borders to Palestinians and Iranians.
Make sure your BDS list is up-to-date and includes these FIFA sponsors.
The World Cup’s arrival is being celebrated as a moment of global attention and intra-national pride across the three nations. Yet, beneath the banner of “United as One” lie entrenched colonial logics and practices.
Listen
Rather than the economic boom promised by sport mega events, local economies and residents suffer as a consequence.
Greg Mercer uncovers how FIFA makes exorbitant and unreasonable demands of host cities. The economic burden is placed on local economies and the most marginalized in our communities.