Work In Progress: Survival and Dignity

How do working people obtain the necessities of life while doing work essential to the functioning of society?

These labour and activist histories capture how workers have organized to create dignified lives in their communities. They include building thriving working-class neighbourhoods, sex workers nurturing community care, and organizing movements to support racialized and migrant workers.

The following examples demonstrate how communities have strived to innovate unique solutions and achieve better quality of life for working people.

About Work In Progress:

Work in Progress — a multi-phase redesign of the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre’s heritage exhibits unfolding until 2027 – reimagines how working people’s stories are told, and who gets to tell them.

Experiences of labour and work are changing at a pace not seen in decades. This project positions our exhibits as an evolving process, and a long-term collaboration between WAHC and community members across the country.

Through Work In Progress , 30 snapshots in labour and people’s history will be honoured with the help of a group of Community Curators– workers, activists, artists and organizers from Hamilton and beyond. From land defenders to care work, tenant activism and mutual aid to unions of unemployed workers, Work In Progress honours and uplifts the many ways people have worked for a more just future across space and time.

To use the words of one Community Curator: “So much of working-class history is left out of textbooks,” she says. “These are stories of resistance, of wins worth remembering. They help people see what’s possible.”

About the Community Curators

Huckleberry Point Collective (Nancy Bouchier, Matt McInnes and Simon Orpana) pursues place-based creative projects that draw attention to the relationships, legacies, cultures, and potentials that, despite histories of violence, trauma and forgetting, continue to sustain us. A city, region or home is, at root, a collection of relationships despite the tendencies of settler culture to disguise such interdependencies as privatized, purchasable commodities. Started by

Simon Orpana, Matt McInnes, Nancy Bouchier and Rob Kristofferson, the Huckleberry Point Collective seeks to nurture projects that can recognize and strengthen community relationships based on principles of equity, sharing and sustainability. Website: https://huckleberrypoint.wordpress.com/

Kwentong Bayan Collective (KBC) is a Toronto-based artist collective. Our artistic mandate is to explore a critical and intersectional approach to community-based art, labour, and education. In the Filipino language, “kwentong bayan” is the literal translation of “community stories.”

A major part of KBC’s work is in collaboration with Filipino migrant care workers, who support Canadian families to care for children, elders, and those with complex medical needs.

For 2025-2026, Kwentong Bayan Collective are participating in the Eastern Comma Artists-in-Residence Program, an initiative of the Musagetes Foundation that has its roots in a long-time programming relationship with the rare Charitable Research Reserve.

KBC’s comic on the history of the Live-in Caregiver Program was published in the award-winning book, Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working Class Struggle . KBC created a Visual Timeline of Caregiving Work in Canada poster that examines the 150+ year history of care work by indigenous and racialized women. Subsequently, this work has been published in textbooks, taught in high schools, colleges and universities, and presented at galleries in Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton, and Noisel, France. http://www.lcpcomicbook.com/ .

Emily Power is president of Caroline Co-op, a housing co-op in Hamilton. In 2024, she led her tenant association in fundraising to purchase the apartment building from their landlord, the first example of a tenant-led, co-op conversion in the city’s history. She received the 2025 Co-op Housing Champion award from the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada for her efforts. Emily is a past tenant organizer with the Hamilton Tenants Solidarity Network and co-director of Trainwreck ( www.trainwreckfilm.ca ), a documentary about light rail transit, gentrification, and resistance. She holds a master’s in urban planning from the University of Toronto and works at Flourish, an affordable housing development consulting non-profit based in Hamilton.

Jelena Vermilion a.k.a Scarlett Gillespie is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and sex workers’ rights advocate based in Hamilton, Ontario. Through mixed media, theatre performances, archival research, and public history, her work explores themes of labour, survival, stigma, and resistance. Vermilion is the Executive Director of the Sex Workers’ Action Program (SWAP) Hamilton and has spent years documenting the hidden histories of sex workers in Canada. Her practice bridges academia, activism, and art, while centering lived experience, collective memory, and the voices of those too often erased from institutional narratives. Her work is a love letter to those who come before us and to those who remain.

Work In Progress is a multi-phase project that has been in development since 2018. As such, many staff and committee members past and present have played a part in shaping it. WAHC acknowledges the following people who impacted this project in ways great and small since its inception:

Siobhan Angus, Florencia Berinstein, Ada Bierling, Tara Bursey, Kento Cady, Dan Hill, Arun Jacob, Rob Kristofferson, Alec Latham, Meredith Leonard, Chantal Mancini, Sonali Menezes, Sylvia Nickerson, Simon Orpana, John Summers and Vinh Thach.

Work In Progress is made possible through the Alfred & Joan Robertshaw Memorial Fund of the Hamilton Community Foundation, the Atkinson Foundation, and supporters of WAHC’s Legacy Fund.

Image credit: Care Work Makes All Other Work Possible , © 2025 Kwentong Bayan Collective, www.lcpcomicbook.com. Image courtesy the artists.