100 in 1 Day – Toronto

June 5, 2014 by FfIPS 1 Comment

100-in-1 Day is an international, citizen-led festival that coordinates a plethora of mini-events and festivals called interventions all across a city, all on the same day.  Part of the fun is helping people to see just how easy it is to take action and make change happen.  The first 100-in-1 Day took place in Bogota, Colombia in 2012 but it has rapidly spread across the globe.  This year 100-in-1 Day Canada is June 7th and it’s taking place in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and Halifax.

Hundreds of fun, thought-provoking grassroots interventions will be popping up all across Toronto this Saturday — and many of them are indoors!  While that might not normally be a particularly exciting feature of a public event, it certainly makes them stand out to us.

Here are just a few of the events that caught our eye:

Convenience Stories and Space That Gives A Sense Of Place celebrate the ordinary, indoor spaces that make a neighbourhood feel like home.  Convenience stories is a walking tour of convenience stores that will ask participants to share memories of convenience stores throughout their lives — surprisingly rich soil for emotion and nostalgia!  Space that Gives a Sense of Place will provide maps and tours of local spaces that bind together three Toronto neighbourhoods — the Junction, Cabbagetown/St. James Town and Leslieville.

We also noticed three intriguing interventions taking place on the TTC:  Sharing Languages on the TTC is going to hand out buttons that identify people as willing conversationalists in various languages; Go Nicely is seeking to bear witness to polite and pleasant behaviour on the TTC throughout the day; and our personal favourite is the Streetcar Back Pack — roving teams of transit heroes will be hanging out at the back of streetcars making them as attractive as possible — with snacks, cushions and music — in order to encourage people to move on back.

Nellie’s Women’s Shelter is having an open house with live music and refreshments to introduce themselves and publicize their workshops on topics like transphobia, voting and take-back-the-night marches.

The Children’s Book Bank is having a book drive.  Some environmentally-minded Torontonian are opening a Free Store at York University where you can pass along things you no longer need and maybe pick up something you do.  Free Stores are such an important and valuable service and we should do our best to find a home for them in other indoor spaces.  Finally, the Toronto Carpet Factory is launching a Little Library — which will be an ongoing project.

There are also tons of awesome outdoor events — live music, public conversations about important topics like mental health, guerrilla art — and some other indoor events that we didn’t have time to cover.  You should definitely check out all the interventions and see what’s going down in your neck of the woods!