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Child Brides

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When Nada Al Ahdal accepted an Arab Women of the Year award for social awareness at a star-studded ceremony in London this year, the child bride activist wore white.

It is her favourite colour - as though, in her fight against an abhorrent, centuries-old custom, Al Ahdal has defiantly reclaimed something symbolic of the pain and grief that marked her early years in Yemen.

"Seeing the suffering of my sister when she tried to commit suicide the same way my aunt did by burning herself ... unfortunately, I didn't have the childhood I was supposed to," she tells The National.

"Especially when my parents decided to end my life by selling me in the name of marriage to a man when I was only 11. Our place, as a child, is in school playing, feeling safe around our parents, not threatened by them.

"I knew that white wedding dress would burn me like it did my aunt and my sister."

Horrified at the result of the hopelessness that overwhelmed her aunt Hashima, 14, and eldest sister Nadia, 13, Al Ahdal resolved not to be the family's next child bride victim.

The journey to save herself propelled the young Al Ahdal to international attention, with interest sustained ever since by the campaign she leads to give victims an escape route like the one her uncle Abdelsalem provided.

"Not every girl will find a man or a relative who will protect her from child marriage," she says. "That's why we speak out for the girls, so people give them attention and see what's going on in some Arab countries - not only in Yemen."

With "Girls Not Brides" at the heart of its mission, the Nada Foundation enshrines education as a fundamental right of children, and the means of social change and economic growth.

Several of its programmes aim to form "a bridge" to the rest of the world, offering English lessons to girls aged 13 to 18 displaced by domestic violence, conflict, early marriage or other abuses, and access to remote learning through international universities.

They will, if she has her way, become the future peacemakers, journalists, activists, political leaders and humanitarians who will rebuild Yemen after the war.

It is apt that the foundation enabled Al Ahdal's own education. After fleeing her homeland, she lived in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Kenya, never remaining more than a year because she was either not allowed to study or did not have the right to stay.

An invitation to England to receive a With and For Girls prize at the Women of the World festival in 2020 set her on a new path.

"Moving from country to country when I was really, really young - it affected me a lot," she says. "My education stopped. So when I came to the UK I had to start from zero. I now have a year left in college but I'm doing great progress. I want to study international law."

These days, Al Ahdal lives with Abdelsalem, whom she calls "Amo" (Arabic for uncle), in Newcastle, where she is sitting her GCSE mock exams in maths and English this week.

Any available downtime is spent capturing her lost childhood: making mischief with her adopted "brother" Akram, drawing, reading and indulging a passion for football, ice cream and billiards.

Abdelsalem might have cause to regret imparting the rudiments of the latter. "My uncle taught me, and now the student beats the teacher," she jokes.

Music is another source of pleasure with Selena Gomez a particular favourite, as well as a Yemeni artist whose name escapes her. "He sings," she says, before giving voice to a snippet of lyrics: "Aadek illa sagheer, badri aleik el hawa."

The song is by Abu Bakr Salem and was inspired by the moment friends spotted his son, then nine, in intimate conversation with a girl his age.

Its wording - loosely translated as "you are still young, it's too early to fall in love" - though arising from a different context, is not entirely out of place in Al Ahdal's narrative.

When discussing the subject, she does not rule out the possibility of dating but it is clearly a distant priority even as a woman now at the age of 20.

"I have a lot of work to do," Al Ahdal says. "Girls need me to save their lives so that's my focus. I don't want to be a housewife now or in the future. I want to be a change-maker."

The sound of her voice is stunning in spite of her protests to the contrary, and testament to the singing group that Abdelsalem would take the young Nada to perform with in Sanaa.

Those sessions were among the few positive memories she has of childhood when she dreamt of moving to the capital from the family home in Zabid to study medicine or teaching.

Their recollection, though, is invariably marred by thoughts of the precious times that she played and sang with Hashima.

"My aunt was my best friend. After she got married, they would not allow me to play with her because of the idea that married girls were not allowed to play with single girls. We were children. She was a child."

A year later, Hashima was dead after dousing herself in petrol and lighting it, leaving behind an infant daughter. Al Ahdal is still haunted by a photograph of her aunt, face blackened, in a death shroud, and speaks of the hatred she bears for the man whose physical and mental cruelty drove her to suicide.

"She had no hope so she had to end her life. I saw the picture of her burnt and dead, and then my sister followed," she recalls, though Nadia survived.

Al Ahdal tended to Nadia's self-immolation wounds, bringing water and food, little suspecting that she had been put forward as her sister's matrimonial replacement.

"She was lying down in bed, and it was awful because my family told me my wedding would be in three days so that's what made me run away," she says.

What she was yet to learn, Al Ahdal says, was that the marriage had already been formalised. All that remained was for the religious ceremony to be held.

She recounts an escape from an earlier arrangement made with a 26-year-old wealthy expatriate for $2,000 when she was 10 thanks to the intervention of her father's brother. Abdelsalem, for his part, has said: "I could not allow her to be married off and have her future destroyed."

His help was sought a second time but he was out of town on a business trip to Saudi Arabia and Al Ahdal turned to an acquaintance out of desperation.

The harrowing two-minute video she subsequently uploaded to reach him and refute her parents' claim that she had been kidnapped went viral after a YouTube user added English captions.

"I escaped from my parents," a tiny, wide-eyed Al Ahdal says. "I am 11 years old and my mum wants me to marry. Is there no mercy in their hearts? I would rather die. They threaten me with death if I go to my uncle. I would rather die than go live with them. They killed our dreams. This is a crime ... a crime."

The allegations of child bride pacts and the threat of an honour killing were denied by her parents, and questions were raised about their veracity by sceptics who accused her of making up parts of the story.

But activists and human rights groups rallied as the plea received nearly eight million views in three days, and it was later shown at the months-long National Dialogue Conference created under the Gulf initiative in 2011 to produce a new Yemeni constitution.

"Social media saved my life," she explains. "After that, I came to believe in speaking out in the name of other girls and spreading awareness that will help save their lives. The people will turn into an army, defend, protect and find a solution for her. That's what I'm trying to do now."

Al Ahdal and her uncle appealed to the Yemeni Ministry of Interior, which, in conjunction with a child welfare organisation, detained her for 10 days during negotiations with members of the family.

In the end, the marriage was annulled, an agreement was put in place that no new pacts would be arranged before she was 18, and legal responsibility was transferred to Abdelsalem in, at times, stormy scenes filmed by CNN.

But if Al Ahdal had been astonished by the response from communities around the world, she was dismayed by that of her own.

She was the target of negativity from elements of Yemeni society angered at the public spurning of a practice all the more entrenched in recent years in a country plagued by poverty.

State officials pressured the Ministry of Interior and Al Ahdal says she was intercepted returning from an interview with a TV station in Lebanon.

She recalls having her passport confiscated, being held again, and made to sign a document banning comments about child marriage in the press or on social media.

Towards the end of 2015, the French publishing house Michel Lafon released her autobiographical La Rosee du Matin (The Morning Dew), and an invitation arrived for a book-signing event in Paris.

While attempting to leave through Aden, Al Ahdal says she and Abdelsalam were bundled into a military vehicle at gunpoint by Al Qaeda, driven to a compound, and interrogated.

"For the first three days, we didn't see daylight - we were blindfolded. They were investigating, 'Who is supporting you?'" she says, explaining the group's suspicion that she was being used as a puppet by a foreign country or NGO.

The uncle and niece were held for 14 days, she says, during which they could hear the screams of other captives - and sometimes their silence after the sound of a gunshot.

The militants, forced to relocate on December 6 by a car bomb attack claimed by ISIS that killed the governor of Aden, again blindfolded the pair, drove near to the abduction site, and released them.

Al Ahdal was offered a visa by Saudi King Salman and years later would step forward, radiant in that white shirt and trousers ensemble, to dedicate the prestigious London Arabia award to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah El Sisi, for championing women's rights.

In Riyadh, she met the Prime Minister of Yemen, Ahmed bin Dagher, and with his backing set up the Nada Foundation while continuing her education.

"But the head of the school said that I, being famous for showing social media about child marriage, would brainwash the other girls. She told me to study at home but I refused," she says.

Eventually, Al Ahdal settled in England which, in many ways, represents what she wished for growing up. "I love everything about the UK. That's the thing I was fighting to have. When I speak, I feel safe. I don't feel like someone will harm me because I'm saying something against their tradition or ideas."

She now stands as champion to countless girls, but it all began with Abdelsalem's provision of safety, unstinting emotional and financial support, and hope as an exemplar of enlightenment.

"What made my uncle really different is education. That's why we [at the foundation] believe in education," she says.

"He was seeing what was going on in my family, and knew it was wrong. That's what I'm saying is a miracle because he is trying his best for a future for me. I don't think every girl has this chance."

The debt of gratitude to Abdelsalem includes his efforts at winning her parents round to the cause. During the most difficult discussions, Al Ahdal summoned thoughts of the ever-present danger of early betrothals faced by her five sisters.

All these years later, her shoulders hunch, the words come more slowly and her eyes well up, as she recalls the first encounter two days after the state took away guardianship.

"My mum said: 'If my daughter comes back, I will break every bone in her body so she can't walk again.' After that, I bought a cake and flowers for her. She was so angry she threw everything on the ground and shouted many things like: 'You're not my daughter any more.'

"It took a long time but we managed. I'm really proud that they gave me a chance to speak to them and change their ideas. There's not one girl in my family who is married or getting married before the age of 18."

The importance of this conversion in propelling Al Ahdal onwards in her mission to stop young girls from being sold "like sheep" cannot be underestimated.

Her grandmother was married at nine, her mother at 13. The custom was followed by the family for generations, revisited as a matter of course on each woman down the line - until now.

She sums up the achievement simply but with a deep conviction: "I made them believe in girls' rights."

The one vow that the indomitable Al Ahdal was prepared to take willingly in childhood was to see to it that other families do the same.

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The Yemeni child bride activist leading the fight against the scourge of early marriage

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When Nada Al Ahdal accepted an Arab Women of the Year award for social awareness at a star-studded ceremony in London this year, the child bride activist wore white. It is her favourite colour - as though, in her fight against an abhorrent, centuries-old custom, Al Ahdal has defiantly reclaimed something symbolic of the pain and grief that marked her early years in Yemen.

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Racial Justice

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Full Biography

Charlene A. Carruthers is a Black, queer feminist community organizer and writer with over 15 years of experience in racial justice, feminist and youth leadership development movement work. As the founding national director of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), she has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national base of activist member-led organization of Black 18-35 year olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people. Her passion for developing young leaders to build capacity within marginalized communities has led her to work on immigrant rights, economic justice and civil rights campaigns nationwide. She has led grassroots and digital strategy campaigns for national organizations including the Center for Community Change, the Women's Media Center, ColorOfChange.org and National People's Action, as well as being a member of a historic delegation of young activists in Palestine in 2015 to build solidarity between Black and Palestinian liberation movements.

Charlene is the founder and executive director of the Chicago Center for Leadership and Transformation, a locally rooted and nationally connected learning community for political education, grassroots organizing, language and strategic communications capacity building.

Her work has been covered in several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Chicago Reader, The Nation, Ebony and Essence Magazines. She has appeared on CNN, Democracy Now!, BBC and MSNBC. Charlene has also written for theRoot.com, CRISIS Magazine, Teen Vogue, Truthout, Colorlines and the Boston Review. She is recognized as one of the top 10 most influential African Americans by The Root 100, one of Ebony Magazine's "Woke 100," an Emerging Power Player in Chicago Magazine and is the 2017 recipient of the YWCA's Dr. Dorothy I. Height Award.

A believer in telling more complete stories about the Black Radical Tradition, Charlene provides critical analysis, political education and leadership development training for activists across the globe. Charlene has served as a featured speaker at various institutions including Wellesley College, Shaw University, Princeton University, Northwestern University and her alma mater Illinois Wesleyan University. Charlene also received a Master of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.

Charlene was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago where she currently resides and continues to lead and partake in social justice movements. Her inspirations include a range of Black women, including her mother, Ella Baker, Cathy Cohen, Marsha P. Johnson and Barbara Ransby. In her free time, Charlene loves to cook and believes the best way to learn about people is through their food.

Charlene is author of the bestselling book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, available in English and Spanish languages (Beacon Press).

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Charlene A. Carruthers is a Black, queer feminist community organizer and writer with over 15 years of experience in racial justice, feminist and youth leadership development movement work. As the founding national director of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), she has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national base of activist member-led organization of Black 18-35 year olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people.

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UK Hunger

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The UN's Global Goal 2 aims to end hunger and malnutrition globally by 2030. But the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked hunger crises all over the world, including in Britain. It's critical that we tackle food poverty, especially for children, otherwise it could have devastating impacts in other areas of life too, including health, education, and more. Take action to protect the most vulnerable communities from COVID-19 and its impacts here.

Not content with forcing the UK government to dramatically u-turn over a free school meal voucher scheme, footballer Marcus Rashford has decided to keep fighting food poverty.

The 22-year-old Manchester United footballer has set up a "child food poverty task force" representing the UK's biggest food brands, with the aim that they will work together to back solutions to food poverty, he revealed in a letter sent to MPs on Tuesday.

It builds on his successful intervention in June, following a government announcement that a voucher scheme given to families to supplement free school meals during the COVID-19 lockdown was going to come to an end.

With families struggling in the pandemic facing a summer without this lifeline, Rashford whipped up public concern and wrote a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson that drew on his own experiences of food poverty growing up, leading to the decision being reversed.

However, Rashford told BBC Breakfast on Tuesday that the decision by the government to extend free school meals over the summer holidays was only a "short-term solution" and that longer term efforts were needed.

He has now signed up businesses including Asda, Co-op, Deliveroo, Iceland, Kellogg's, Lidl, Sainsbury's, Tesco, and Waitrose, and the nonprofits FareShare and the Food Foundation, to join the new task force to help support those solutions.

The group has said it backs the three main recommendations of the National Food Strategy, a government-commissioned report published on July 29.

One of those recommendations is for an additional 1.5 million children to be included in the free school meals scheme - meaning they would get at least one nutritionally healthy meal a day. All households on universal credit benefits should get access, the recommendation says, not just the very poorest as is the case now.

Another proposal supported by Rashford's task force was for an extension to the government's "healthy start" voucher scheme which provides vouchers for fresh fruit, milk, and vegetables. It suggested the provisions should be increased to £4.25 a week, extended to all pregnant women, and offered to all households with a child under the age of four where a parent is claiming benefits.

Finally, the task force supports calls for an additional 1.1 million children (all those from families on universal credit rather than just some) to have access to free holiday provision, meaning access to food and activities during the school holidays.

The task force says implementing the three recommendations would mark a "unifying step to identifying a long-term solution to child poverty in the UK".

It is hoped that the broad support for the recommendations from the food industry will put further pressure on the government to take them up.

"When we pause, listen, and reflect on what the future of our next generation could potentially look like, it's easy to see that if we don't take action quickly, the issue of child food poverty will have devastating effects on the stability of our country," Rashford wrote in his letter to the government.

He added: "These children are the future - our next generation of NHS workers, police officers, footballers, and politicians."

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Footballer Marcus Rashford Launches UK Task Force to Tackle Food Poverty

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The UN's Global Goal 2 aims to end hunger and malnutrition globally by 2030. But the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked hunger crises all over the world, including in Britain. It's critical that we tackle food poverty, especially for children, otherwise it could have devastating impacts in other areas of life too, including health, education, and more.

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Drugs

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As a staff reporter with the Georgia Straight, Travis Lupick closely covered Vancouver's opioid overdose crisis as deaths began to rise in 2015 and 2016. He documented the start of an unsanctioned overdose prevention site in the Downtown Eastside that led to the low-barrier harm reduction model being adopted across B.C. and in other parts of Canada, and spent years following the policy discussions and the human tragedy of the toxic drug crisis.

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In 2017 he published his first book, Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City's Struggle With Addiction. The book traced the roots of Vancouver's drug user activism and the raucous political fights to run needle exchange programs and unofficial safe injection sites, leading to the opening of Insite, North America's first legal supervised consumption site, in 2003.

Lupick has now turned his attention to the United States, where 100,000 people died of overdose in 2021 but basic harm reduction methods such as needle exchanges still face pushback in some states. His new book, Light Up the Night: America's Overdose Crisis and the Drug Users Fighting for Survival, looks at the overdose crisis in the U.S. through the life experiences of two drug user activists, Jess Tilley and Louise Vincent.

Lupick recently spoke to The Tyee from his home in Ventura, California. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: When you were writing Fighting for Space, did you have it in your mind at that point that you wanted to take a look at what was happening in the United States, or did that come later?
Travis Lupick: I knew that I wanted to write a second book and I knew that I wanted it rooted more in the ongoing overdose crisis, as opposed to where Fighting for Space looks back at history.

Then I took Fighting for Space on a mini book tour, mostly of the northeastern United States. On that tour, I was kind of just keeping my eyes open for interesting stories and something that I might be able to fit into the larger themes of drug user activism in the current opioid crisis. And then I met with this one woman who I thought was just incredible. Then a couple of weeks later I met this second woman who I thought was just incredible, and then I found out that the two of them knew each other and were working together. As I started to get to know them a little bit better, a story emerged and I thought they were amazing enough to write a whole book about.

In some ways, I feel like it's this ongoing story of drug user activism in the United States that continues the story I told in Fighting for Space, even though they're set in different places. I think that there's a chronological continuity there because Fighting for Space looks at drug user activism from the early 1990s to around 2010.

Vancouver's a little bit ahead of the United States on drug user activism. We had the continent's first injection site in 2003, and before that the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users was founded in 1997, so Vancouver's had this history of drug user activism for a while.

While some areas of the United States have that as well, this more national movement that I write about in Light Up the Night - it's kind of just taking off right now.
I think we always have this idea that the U.S. is behind Canada in terms of harm-reduction policies, but I'm not sure that's true. What's your take on the biggest differences between Canada and the U.S. when it comes to drug policy and harm reduction?
I do have to be careful not to overgeneralize, because you had drug user activism associated with needle exchanges in the Seattle area in the mid-1990s. You had a vocal activist collective based in New York, in the Bronx, and of course there was HIV-AIDS and LGBTQ+ activism in response to the AIDS crisis. It got needle exchanges going very early in the United States, and of course intravenous injection users were also affected by the AIDS crisis - that was the spark for early drug user activism and harm reduction in the United States.

But it's fair to say that Vancouver took it further and faster than any other region. From 2003 right up until 2016, we were the only city in the entire continent to have a supervised injection site. And since 2016, subsequent sites have only opened in Canada. They're still fighting for a sanctioned site in the United States, in cities like Philadelphia and New York, and Seattle.*

So for sure, there were pockets, but it didn't move anywhere near as far and as fast as Vancouver - until now.
Do you have any thoughts about why this is the moment?
Sadly, I think this is a moment borne out of crisis. The overdose crisis in the United States has killed 100,000 people in the last 12 months. That compares to an annual average of around 15,000 in the 1990s. So 25 years later, we've jumped from 15,000 to 100,000 deaths a year.

That's where I think this new sort of energy in the American harm reduction movement is coming from. The activism and the harm reduction in Fighting for Space was very much launched during Vancouver's overdose crisis of the 1990s, when we saw annual deaths jump from 100 to 400 in a few years. Just as we saw in Vancouver in the 1990s, we're seeing harm reduction and drug user activism jump-started in the United States right now by this crisis.
I wanted to talk about Jess Tilley and Louise Vincent a little bit because they are such compelling characters in your book. Could you tell me a bit about the process of spending time with them and how their stories ended up shaping the book?
I met Jess in Boston. I was speaking at Boston Health Care for the Homeless, which is a big sort of hospital drop-in and clinic. The organizers had assigned somebody to do an intro and opening for me and that ended up being Jess Tilley. And we didn't know each other before that, but we got to know each other that day as we were building a mock safe injection site inside the hospital as a demo for what could be.

Jess lives about two hours outside of Boston in a beautiful little town called Northampton. And I made a number of trips there over a couple of years, staying for about a week each time on Jesse's couch and interviewing her on her back porch, late into the night.

Louise Vincent I met because I heard that she was sort of the person to know for drug user activism in Greensboro, North Carolina. Someone had organized a talk for me there at a church about Fighting for Space, and I was told last minute that Louise couldn't make it because she was in the hospital.

A friend of a friend said, "If you're in Greensboro can you bring her some flowers for me?" And so I bought some flowers and I went to the hospital. It was just like this incredible scene out of a war movie, where I walk into her hospital room and she's sitting on the bed in a gown and she's got IVs in her. She's got activists from across the region on one side of the room holding a meeting. She's on the phone with folks in New Orleans organizing a protest, and then while she's on the phone, she's got her computer in front of her and she's got a Zoom meeting going on while she's writing emails. And she's doing all of this simultaneously while she's about to go into the operating room to have her leg amputated.

I'm not even sure she actually remembers that first meeting with me because there was so much going on in the room. I just kind of quickly popped in and said "hello," but she briefly mentioned that I should come back and visit her and spend more time with her.

I don't know if she was just being polite or whatever, but I called her up and I invited myself out there and flew to Greensboro and then flew there again four or five more times, again doing interviews late into the night. And what Louise is doing there is amazing: she's running a needle exchange, a drop-in, and she's doing some drug user organizing out of that needle exchange.
They had all these experiences that really illustrated all of the barriers that people who use drugs face. Did you talk to them about whether it would be OK to use that material that's so personal?
So many people who end up with problematic drug use, especially with heroin, are not doing it for fun. They're doing it because they're dealing with past trauma. For women, it's often sexual abuse that eventually leads to a heroin addiction. These are people who are healing and self-medicating, and have been rejected by the system, and that was very much the story for Jess and Louise.

Louise struggles with bipolar disorder and felt like she never just quite fit in with society and was treated quite badly by society throughout her youth. And then subsequently she suffered all sorts of abuse through a series of bad boyfriends and things like that, so there's a lot of trauma in Louise's past.

Jess, similarly, was sexually abused as a child and sexually abused again through her teen years. The first time she did heroin she felt all right for the first time in a very, very long time.

So that's how these two women came to problematic drug use and then later found activism out of that drug use, and I really go to great lengths establishing that narrative in the book. I think it's so important that we understand that people who use drugs are often self-medicating; they are often victims of trauma and mental illness. Because I think if we understand that, then we understand that if you're throwing these people in jail, all you're doing is victimizing the victims.

We had a lot of talks about how such personal experiences would fit into the book, but immediately they both understood not only that that was what I wanted to do, but that was what they wanted to do. Right from the get-go, the idea was we want to explain harm reduction and we want to explain drug user activism. We want to explain it through [their] stories.

There's a purpose to this book, it's not just a narrative. We want to explain harm reduction to people, and we want to explain trauma and addiction to people. They've both been activists for a very long time and understand the value of stories, and understand how important it is to get harm reduction to a wider audience.
I think of the United States as being the originator of the war on drugs, an approach that emphasizes enforcing laws that prohibit drug use, trafficking and manufacturing. Do you think there's been a shift away from that war-on-drugs mindset, which focuses so heavily on law enforcement and incarcerating drug users? And do you think it's filtered up to decision-makers?
I think it's very fair to say that the United States is where the war on drugs began, where it's perpetuated and where it has spread to the rest of the globe. It was the United States that lobbied the United Nations to push hard drug laws on countries around the world. It was the [ambassador of the] United States who actually visited Vancouver ahead of Insite's opening and said, "Do not do this."

You actually do see bipartisan support across both the Democrat and Republican parties on issues like unfair sentencing for so-called " white drugs" and "black drugs," and for general sentencing reform and prison reform. Sadly, these are the exceptions to the rule. The United States' war on drugs very much continues, and since fentanyl arrived, has intensified in a lot of ways.

Just as that prison reform movement was picking up, fentanyl arrived and lawmakers were desperate to show their constituents they were doing anything to stop fentanyl. And what most of them right across the country decided on were stiffer penalties for drug use involving fentanyl and dealing fentanyl.

From there, you saw the development of something called a drug-induced homicide charge, which is something we've not seen in Canada. These laws have been passed across the country, saying if you're caught dealing fentanyl, you're going to go to jail for a very long time. We're not going to charge you with dealing, we're going to charge you with murder.

How that law has been used is not only against dealers, but against a married couple who uses drugs together and one of them dies, and the other one goes to prison for murder. In the book, I mention the story of two brothers: one of them dies, one of them picked up the drugs - and he goes to jail for murder.

And while there is some reform around things like Suboxone distribution and needle exchanges, in other ways - especially on stiffer sentences for fentanyl - the war on drugs in the United States is really being waged heavier than ever before.
Jess Tilley and Louise Vincent both live in smaller cities, and when we see supervised injection sites proposed, it's always in big cities. When activists in Canada started setting up overdose prevention sites, they were a lower-barrier version of the supervised injection site, and they were able to be set up in smaller towns like Nanaimo, B.C. and Lethbridge, Alberta. Has that been happening in the U.S.? What would the reaction from law enforcement be?
That doesn't fly in the United States because the kind of activism that we see in Vancouver, with Ann Livingston and Sarah Blyth pitching a tent in a back alley and telling the media about it, can't happen in the United States. You will go to jail.

I didn't understand until I started writing the book and spent so much time in the United States just how much more severe the war on drugs is down here... just how much more hostile to drug use police and the general public are.

That said, there is a little of that happening. There's been a couple of academic papers published about an underground injection site that's been running somewhere in the United States for three or four years now. And of course, drug users have been setting up semi-organized places to do drugs for as long as people have done drugs. But that's as far as that sort of underground guerrilla activism has gone in the United States, because the risks are so much greater here than in Canada. People like Louise and Jess who are pushing the limits on drugs or activism in harm reduction are taking a very real risks with their lives.
What are your hopes for the book when it comes out?
There are dozens of books about the overdose crisis now, but they're not written by people who use drugs. Everybody always gets clean at the end, and that's a different perspective.

Louise, Jess and I want people to learn about harm reduction. We want people to learn that there is a drug user activist movement where people are taking their lives into their own hands and demanding a say at the table of drug policy.

We want people to learn about trauma and mental illness, and how that can play into addiction, and through that understanding, being a little bit more sympathetic and compassionate towards people who use drugs.

More than anything, we want to give people who use drugs a voice. There's this interesting thing that happens when you're caught using drugs where nobody believes a word you say anymore. We want to give them that voice and use the book to demand a seat at the table, because they have ideas that can reduce overdose deaths that can potentially solve the overdose crisis, but no one's listening to them.
Travis Lupick's new book, 'Light Up the Night: America's Overdose Crisis and the Drug Users Fighting for Survival' (The New Press), will be available as of Jan. 4, 2022.
*Editor's note: On Nov. 30, 2021, New York opened two supervised injection sites, the country's first.

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fighting for space: how a group of drug users transformed one city’s struggle with addiction

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light up the night: america’s overdose crisis and the drug users fighting for survival

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Activists Who Are Risking All to End the War on Drugs | The Tyee

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As a staff reporter with the Georgia Straight, Travis Lupick closely covered Vancouver's opioid overdose crisis as deaths began to rise in 2015 and 2016. He documented the start of an unsanctioned overdose prevention site in the Downtown Eastside that led to the low-barrier harm reduction model being adopted across B.C.

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Women's Rights

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Climate Change

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Earth Guardians Youth Director Xiuhtezcatl (pronounced 'Shoe-Tez-Caht') (he/him), is a 19-year-old indigenous climate activist, hip-hop artist, and powerful voice of a global youth-led environmental movement.

He focuses on educating his generation worldwide about the state of the planet they are inheriting and inspiring them to take action to create a better world. His work has been featured on PBS, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, The Daily Show, Comedy Central, CNN, MSNBC, HBO, and VICE.

The Organization

Xiuhtezcatl is Youth Director for Earth Guardians, which works to inspire, galvanize, and train diverse youth to be effective leaders in the climate and social justice movement-using art, music, storytelling, civic engagement, and legal action to advance solutions. Earth Guardians Crews work to implement campaigns and projects in their own communities around the world.

Visit Website

TAKE ACTION

"Educating communities about climate change is key-showing them that their lifestyles are contributing to it and giving them ways through our '50 Simple Things' list to reduce their personal footprints."
-Xiuhtezcatl Martinez

Reflect

Who is most impacted by climate change, locally and globally?

Support

Donate to Earth Guardians.

Engage

Reduce your carbon footprint with help from Earth Guardians.

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Xiuhtezcatl Martinez - Gates Discovery Center

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Earth Guardians Youth Director Xiuhtezcatl (pronounced 'Shoe-Tez-Caht') (he/him), is a 19-year-old indigenous climate activist, hip-hop artist, and powerful voice of a global youth-led environmental movement. He focuses on educating his generation worldwide about the state of the planet they are inheriting and inspiring them to take action to create a better world.

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Gun Violence

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Paul (he/him) is a social justice advocate who works to end anti-Black racism and systemic violence. As Manager of Mayoral Outreach at Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Paul works with mayors across the country to amplify their voices in support of gun safety laws while facilitating the exchange of local strategies and tactics among municipal officials to reduce gun violence. Paul has also worked with the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, where he led the organization's efforts to build its strategies, expand its membership, and support the next generation of leaders.

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Paul (he/him) is a social justice advocate who works to end anti-Black racism and systemic violence. As Manager of Mayoral Outreach at Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Paul works with mayors across the country to amplify their voices in support of gun safety laws while facilitating the exchange of local strategies and tactics among municipal officials to reduce gun violence.

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Voters

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The Organization

Winter sees herself as a bridge builder. She doesn't consider herself to be an expert on gun-violence, criminal justice reform, or any other major issue; however, she is committed to working with people, organizations, and communities to ensure that everyone, especially young people, are taking charge of their immediate agency to facilitate change. In fall 2019, Winter is launching her non-profit Just Active. Just Active is an organization with a mission to empower young people by placing them in positions of influence within organizations, companies, and their communities.

TAKE ACTION

"Making civic engagement personal and accessible are big pieces in how I approach my work...we don't always understand how decisions made on Capitol Hill or our local school board elections impact our day-to-day lives.

-Winter BreeAnne

Reflect

How will you use your voice to make a difference?

Support

Stay tuned for the launch of Just Active this fall.

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Winter BreeAnne - Gates Discovery Center

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Winter sees herself as a bridge builder. She doesn't consider herself to be an expert on gun-violence, criminal justice reform, or any other major issue; however, she is committed to working with people, organizations, and communities to ensure that everyone, especially young people, are taking charge of their immediate agency to facilitate change.

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Disability Rights

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Lydia (they/them) is a community organizer, writer, speaker, educator, attorney, and advocate for disability justice. They were born in Jiangsu, China in 1993 and are currently a Justice Catalyst Fellow at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and Founder/Co-Director of the Autistic People of Color Fund at the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network. They work to disrupt and end all forms of systemic and interpersonal violence targeting disabled people at the margins of the margins. Lydia fights for love, liberation, and community care.

The Organization

Lydia is currently a Justice Catalyst Fellow with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, which advocates for the civil rights, full inclusion, and equality of adults and children with mental disabilities. The Center was instrumental in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. Over the last decade, it has worked to address unnecessary institutionalization in public facilities and remedy segregation in nursing homes, schools and classrooms.

Visit Website

TAKE ACTION

"I believe in multiple strategies and tactics, since liberation is complex and requires transforming all parts of our society and culture to get to the kind of world where we can all live completely free and in communities centered on love."
-Lydia X. Z. Brown

Reflect

How does society define your identity and how do you?

Support

Donate to the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.

Engage

Learn More through the Bazelon Center's Resource Library.

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Lydia X. Z. Brown - Gates Discovery Center

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Lydia (they/them) is a community organizer, writer, speaker, educator, attorney, and advocate for disability justice. They were born in Jiangsu, China in 1993 and are currently a Justice Catalyst Fellow at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and Founder/Co-Director of the Autistic People of Color Fund at the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network.

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LGBTQ Rights

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Lindsay (they/them) is a queer activist, artist, and storyteller from New York City. They create and host Queer Kid Stuff, an LGBTQ+ educational web series for all ages. They obtained their college degree from Northwestern University in theater and gender studies and an advanced degree from Queen Mary University in London. They focus on a wide a range of LGBTQ+ justice topics and how to convey ideas in the most simple and accessible ways for anyone to understand, even young children. Their work has been recognized by HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Kidscreen, and the Webby Awards. They are also co-founder of Bluelaces Theater Company in New York, which creates multi-sensory theatrical experiences for people with autism and other developmental differences.

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Lindsay (they/them) is a queer activist, artist, and storyteller from New York City. They create and host Queer Kid Stuff, an LGBTQ+ educational web series for all ages. They obtained their college degree from Northwestern University in theater and gender studies and an advanced degree from Queen Mary University in London.

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Immigration

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Immigration

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Isra (she/her) is a Syrian-American civil rights activist, campaigns and advocacy expert, and public speaker. She serves as the Refugee, Migration, and Protection Campaign Lead at Oxfam, where she advocates for vulnerable people such as refugees, asylum seekers, and temporary protected status (TPS) holders, and fights against discriminatory policies such as Muslim bans.

Trump's Executive Order 13769 also known as the Muslim ban, not only reduces the total number of refugees accepted into the U.S., it bans entry by citizens of several majority-Muslim countries including Syria. Being personally impacted by this ban and unable to reunite with her family in Syria, Isra is passionately driven in her work for reuniting families and advocating for vulnerable people.

The Organization

Isra serves as the Refugee Campaign Lead at Oxfam, a global organization working to end the injustice of poverty. Oxfam works in more than 90 countries and reaches tens of millions of people with community-led projects that help people build better futures for themselves, hold the powerful accountable, and save lives in disasters.

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TAKE ACTION

"This is a fight, not just for today or tomorrow or even this year. It's a fight to reclaim the vision of the Statue of Liberty. Of welcoming people, no matter where they come from or what they believe."

Reflect

What does a nation's response to refugees say about its values?

Support

Donate to Oxfam's Global Refugee Crisis fund.

Engage

Sign Oxfam's petition to welcome refugees.

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Isra (she/her) is a Syrian-American civil rights activist, campaigns and advocacy expert, and public speaker. She serves as the Refugee, Migration, and Protection Campaign Lead at Oxfam, where she advocates for vulnerable people such as refugees, asylum seekers, and temporary protected status (TPS) holders, and fights against discriminatory policies such as Muslim bans.

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Prison Reform

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Ismael (he/him) is a criminal justice and prison reform advocate, currently working with The Fortune Society to support formerly incarcerated people transition back into society after their release.

When Ismael was a teenager, he was arrested for robbery and sent to Rikers Island where he spent 300 days in solitary confinement before he was ever convicted of a crime. His personal experience with the prison system motivated him to become a passionate advocate for young people and inspired to stand up for disenfranchised voices. Ismael has worked with numerous advocacy projects including Raise the Age campaign, Banning Solitary Confinement, and Rikers Reform. In 2015, he was recognized for his contributions and received the Peabody Award for Community Activism.

The Organization

Ismael focuses his work on numerous social justice and human rights injustices, not only to shed light on these issues, but also to encourage others to take action and become a part of the solution. In addition to his day-to-day work as a case manager for individuals through The Fortune Society, he is a tireless advocate for juvenile justice reform with organizations such as Performing Statistics. Performing Statistics works with incarcerated youth to become creative and civic leaders in their communities and directly affect laws and public policy decisions.

Visit Website

TAKE ACTION

"A lot of times people may feel they don't have a voice, but when we're talking about the criminal justice system, we all have a voice."

Reflect

How does racism impact the criminal justice system in the U.S.?

Support

Donate to Performing Statistics.

Engage

Join the conversation with Performing Statistics.

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Ismael (he/him) is a criminal justice and prison reform advocate, currently working with The Fortune Society to support formerly incarcerated people transition back into society after their release. When Ismael was a teenager, he was arrested for robbery and sent to Rikers Island where he spent 300 days in solitary confinement before he was ever convicted of a crime.

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Rewriting the Law for Sexual Assault Survivors

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Amanda (she/her) is a civil rights advocate fighting to change the U.S. criminal justice system on behalf of sexual assault survivors-and she's winning.

In 2013, Amanda was raped during her senior year at Harvard University. Facing hurdles about her rights as a survivor, Amanda decided to fight for justice and change the laws. She wrote the Sexual Assault Survivors' Bill of Rights, which includes the right for survivors to have a rape kit procedure at no cost and the requirement that kits will be preserved for 20 years. The bill passed unanimously into federal law in 2016.

Now 27, Amanda is the founder and CEO of Rise, which advocates for survivors' rights and assists people to write and pass their own bills. She is a nominee for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.

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Amanda (she/her) is a civil rights advocate fighting to change the U.S. criminal justice system on behalf of sexual assault survivors-and she's winning. In 2013, Amanda was raped during her senior year at Harvard University. Facing hurdles about her rights as a survivor, Amanda decided to fight for justice and change the laws.

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Education/Literacy

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Amanda (she/her) is a poet, community leader, and speaker from Los Angeles, California. At 19 she was named the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate in the U.S. after publishing her first collection of poetry in 2015.

When Amanda was 16, she started a community project called One Pen One Page, focused on literacy and youth activism. Now, she's a senior at Harvard University and continues to advocate for literacy and education with the non-profit 826 National.

The Organization

In addition to her poetry readings and speaking engagements, Amanda is working with 826 National to launch an op-ed essay writing campaign. 826 National is the largest youth writing network in the country, supporting writing, publishing, and tutoring in eight major U.S. cities, serving nearly 34,000 under-resourced students ages 6-18 each year.

Visit Website

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Amanda (she/her) is a poet, community leader, and speaker from Los Angeles, California. At 19 she was named the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate in the U.S. after publishing her first collection of poetry in 2015. When Amanda was 16, she started a community project called One Pen One Page, focused on literacy and youth activism.

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Hunger

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Gun Violence

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Gun Violence

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Gun Violence

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Climate Change

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Age: 23, Hometown: White Plains, NY
"Climate change isn't just about temperatures and weather, it's about people. Our earth will be here for millennia, it's up to us to decide if humanity will be too."
Vic is from low-lying land in New York, which is threatened by rising sea levels and more frequent storm surges, and has felt firsthand climate impacts in the form of Hurricane Sandy, when his home lost power and his school and local transport shut down. Vic is a Fellow with the Alliance for Climate Education, and traveled to Paris to attend and speak at the COP21 UN Conference on Climate Change. After marching in solidarity with more than 400,000 people at the People's Climate March in New York City, he organized his peers in local frontline climate campaigns, met with the Minister of Environment and Energy for the Maldives, and met with former U.S. astronaut, Kathryn D. Sullivan, who now serves as the Administrator for NOAA. He spoke at the United Nations headquarters in New York City for the High-Level Thematic Debate on Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. He cares deeply about climate change, justice, and human rights, especially regarding the ways climate change affects young people like him.

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Age: 23, Hometown: White Plains, NY "Climate change isn't just about temperatures and weather, it's about people. Our earth will be here for millennia, it's up to us to decide if humanity will be too."

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Climate Change

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On Friday morning, Alexandria Villaseñor, who, at fourteen years old, is one of the youngest organizers of the global climate strike, took the subway from Grand Central to Foley Square, in downtown Manhattan. This would be her forty-first week in a row of climate-striking. Inspired by Greta Thunberg, who had first skipped school to strike outside the Swedish Parliament, in August, 2018, Villaseñor had been demonstrating every Friday outside the United Nations since December 14th. Now she was on the subway with a group of other young activists, who had come to New York to join the strike and participate as delegates in the United Nations Youth Climate Summit, on Saturday. One of her collaborators on the train, Ciara Lonergan, who is seventeen, had interviewed her for a high-school English project on climate change. "The fact that she started this in the United States-it's been so important," Lonergan said. "The worldwide attention we have today is thanks to this movement." Later that afternoon, Villaseñor would be introducing Thunberg, who was scheduled to give a speech at 5 P.M., in Battery Park. "I'm ready," she told me.

The rally was scheduled to begin at noon. By 10 A.M., the square was hot in the sunshine, and already packed with thousands of cheering students and families. New York City schools had given all of their 1.1 million students an excused absence for the strike (but not the teachers, although I met several of them in the square). A class of sixth graders from Fort Greene was interviewing other young activists, including Avery Tsai, age nine, a staple on the climate-activism scene, who wore a floral crown and a cape covered in buttons. She carried an oversized cardboard cutout of a house in flames that read "Our House Is on Fire." An eleven-year-old named Nazir Miller-Parker had a clipboard and was writing down a question that he planned to ask people at the march: "What can you do to stop climate change?" Workers all over the world, including a contingent from Amazon, were following the teen-agers' lead and striking, too. Six thousand company Web sites had shut down and redirected visitors to the global-climate-strike Web site. In the next few hours, tens of thousands more people flooded the square. Globally-there were strikes on every continent, and in a hundred and fifty-six countries, with huge turnouts in cities including Sydney, Berlin, and Munich-more than three million people were out in the streets.

Villaseñor was wearing corduroys, hiking boots, a walkie-talkie on her belt, and, like all of the members of the New York strike's planning committee, a green climate-strike T-shirt with her name emblazoned on the back. She seemed somehow both giddy and calm. Another local teen-age organizer with a walkie-talkie, Shiv Soin, came over and gave her a hug. "All I'm doing is walking around, making sure everyone is alive," he said. "And to make sure our demands are met." They laughed. Villaseñor was rattling those demands off all morning: an end to fossil fuels, a complete and equitable transition to a clean-energy economy, and all fossil-fuel executives being held accountable. She feels angry a lot of the time, she said, and "a kind of ecogrief" for everything that the world is losing. "But, when I go out and protest, it's one of the ways that I feel like I have a say in what's going to happen."

Villaseñor moved to Manhattan with her mom in early 2018. In November, she returned to Davis, California, where she grew up, to visit family who still lived there. While on the trip, the Camp Fire broke out-one of the most destructive wildfires in California's history-which scientists have attributed to climate change. Although she was nearly a hundred miles from the fire, "smoke was coming in the house," she told me a few weeks ago, during one of her Friday strikes outside the United Nations. Villaseñor has asthma. "My chest started to get prickly, as it does with asthma," she said. "I felt like needles were pinching my chest." She kept a wet washcloth over her face, and relatives put wet towels under doors and windows, then sent her back to New York early on a red-eye. "She was really upset and angry when she got home," her mother, Kristin Hogue, told me. "And sick for a few weeks. I had to take her to see a pulmonologist."

Last December, as Villaseñor started researching climate change and wildfires, she saw Thunberg give a speech at the United Nations climate talks, in which she told the assembled delegates, "You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children." Villaseñor decided that she was going to strike, too, even if she and her mother weren't exactly hopeful that it would amount to much. "We laughed and laughed," Hogue said. "This is New York City-everybody is holding a sign on a street corner." They made a sign that read, like Thunberg's, "School Strike for Climate." Arriving at the United Nations, she sat on the steps, and a guard told her that she had to move. "She got mad, and a guard kindly told her that she could sit on a nearby bench and hold her sign there," Hogue said. That's where she has sat for the past forty Fridays-in wind, in rain, and in a subzero sleeping bag during a polar vortex. She eventually founded her own climate-strike organization, Earth Uprising, which helped plan last March's student-led global climate strike, and also Friday's. She and Thunberg became friends online; the week after Thunberg arrived in New York, following her sailing trip across the Atlantic, she joined Villaseñor outside the U.N. for a climate strike.

Before Villaseñor became an activist, she spent a lot of time outside, acting in plays, and hanging out with her friends. "Normal kid stuff," she said. She loved to swim in the rivers and streams near her home in California; her favorite animals were anything in the cat family-lions, tigers-although, if she could be any animal, she'd be a fish. After she started striking, she soon began spending hours each day talking to other youth climate activists on social media. "My view on life has changed," she told me. "I see more of the structures that society has put in place. And that's why my generation has been so impactful with the climate movement. We're organizing outside of the structures that adults work in. Since getting involved, I just see how the system is broken, and it's one of the things that needs to change."

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New York's Original Teen-Age Climate Striker Welcomes a Global Movement

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On Friday morning, Alexandria Villaseñor, who, at fourteen years old, is one of the youngest organizers of the global climate strike, took the subway from Grand Central to Foley Square, in downtown Manhattan. This would be her forty-first week in a row of climate-striking.

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Environment

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Ilhan Omar's Daughter, Isra Hirsi, Is 16 and Saving the Planet

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Environment

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Genesis Butler: 12 Year-Old Plant-Based Activist

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This young activist says most kids are open to eating plant-based — it’s their parents who need to be encouraged to accept change.

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World Peace

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Bana, born in 2009 in Aleppo, Syria, is known worldwide for her tweets during the siege of the city in 2016 and for her subsequent calls for peace and an end to all global conflict. Her tweets have earned her a legion of admirers around the world by giving a remarkable insight into the daily horrors of life in the city at this time, including air strikes, hunger and the prospect of her family's death. In December 2016, Bana and her family were safely evacuated from Aleppo to Turkey. Bana's debut book, DEAR WORLD, published with Simon & Schuster in 2017 and has sold in over 17 countries globally. In her own words, and featuring affecting letters from her mother, Fatemah, DEAR WORLD is not just a gripping account of a family endangered by war it also offers a uniquely intimate, child's-eye perspective of one of the biggest humanitarian crises in history. In the past year, Bana has been awarded the 2018 Atlantic Council Freedom Award and has been named a Rising Star by the Asian Awards 2018.

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Bana, born in 2009 in Aleppo, Syria, is known worldwide for her tweets during the siege of the city in 2016 and for her subsequent calls for peace and an end to all global conflict.

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Black Lives Matter

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A Message...A Movement...A Role Model! ACTIVISM SPOTLIGHT

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MEET THANDIWE ABDULLAH According to Complex.com... In 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement sprouted in response to the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. A couple years later, in 2015, Thandiwe Abdullah helped launch the next generation of Black rights activists-the Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard. Now, Abdullah is sixteen and she's hailed for playing [...]

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Education

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Learn how Malala began her fight for girls — from an education activist in Pakistan to the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate — and how she continues her campaign through Malala Fund.

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Climate Change

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Today, Greta Thunberg set sail for the United States.

The 16-year-old climate activist is traveling across the Atlantic Ocean on a sailboat. She is heading for New York City. She will attend a United Nations climate-change summit there in September.

Greta lives in Sweden. She refuses to fly because airplanes produce carbon emissions that harm the planet. Cruise ships are also big polluters.

Last month, the team behind the Malizia II offered to bring Greta to the United States. The Malizia is a high-tech racing sailboat. It generates electricity using solar panels and underwater turbines. Greta hopes to create zero carbon emissions on her journey across the Atlantic.

The 60-foot boat was designed for ocean races, not for comfort. It has no toilet or shower. Passengers will eat freeze-dried food. The trip is expected to last two weeks.

"It's not very luxurious," Greta says. "It's not very fancy, but I don't need that. I need only a bed and just the basic things."

Greta will be joined by her father and by a documentary filmmaker, who will record the trip. Two members of the boat's team, Boris Herrmann and Pierre Casiraghi, will also be onboard.

"It can be calm and smooth and going along, and you can read a book," Herrmann says. "Or it can be really rough, and you hold on and try to fight seasickness and [it] can be really hard."

Greta has become famous as the face of the youth movement for climate awareness. In August 2018, she began staging frequent sit-ins outside of Swedish parliament. Her efforts inspired climate-focused protests around the world. In March 2019, Greta was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The winner will be announced in October. If Greta wins, she will become the youngest-ever recipient of the award.

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Today, Greta Thunberg set sail for the United States. The 16-year-old climate activist is traveling across the Atlantic Ocean on a sailboat. She is heading for New York City. She will attend a United Nations climate-change summit there in September....