Over four years, volunteering, interning, and working with organizations dedicated to building positive community relationships with unhoused individuals in Milton Park, McGill University graduate Lil Borger recognized the opportunity to create spaces grounded in dignity where community members could gather, offer mutual support, and strengthen their connections. Lil applied to the Pathy Foundation Fellowship to continue working with students, grassroots organizations, organizers, and the unhoused community in Milton Park to collectively envision how these spaces and opportunities could be realized.  

Pathy Fellows are supported in designing and implementing an innovative project in a community they have a meaningful, pre-existing connection with. Lil’s initiative, “Building Relationships Between Students and Unhoused Individuals”, is an effort to cultivate meaningful connections in the community, ensure organizations feel supported and sustained in their work, and to create opportunities for students to be more engaged community members. “Through helping students become the community members that they want to be, there is a positive impact for the rest of the community – the unhoused community, non-student residents in Milton-Park, really everyone there.” 

Lil is partnering with various grassroots and student organizations in Milton Park to develop workshops for students that involve both student and community member facilitation. These workshops will be tailored based on the level of involvement that students already have in the community. For new students, Lil is developing a workshop to share resources and collectively discuss students’ visions for interacting with community. For students who are already engaged, various workshops are being developed to continuously improve these neighbourhood relationships, including harm reduction trainings, storytelling from community members with lived experience of homelessness, and neighbourhood tours. The goal is to create multiple educational opportunities that strengthen avenues for students to meaningfully interact, engage, volunteer, and coexist in Milton Park. 

“When students walk through a neighbourhood on their way to school and have to decide how they’re going to interact, without support or guidance on engaging in community, they often fall back on ignoring unhoused members of the community,” Lil notes. “Living in Montréal was my first time living in an urban setting and I sometimes found myself falling into that pattern and I felt really conflicted – wanting to be a better neighbour but not knowing how.” 

Stemming from their experience, Lil is motivated to create opportunities for others to navigate these relationships with guidance and awareness. “We should all be thinking about how we interact with the world, and I want to help improve the support for other students who want to be involved in their communities and those who might not yet realize that they want to become more engaged community members,” Lil explains. 

After observing, participating, and communicating in the community over the past few years, and through the Fellowship, Lil shares another community priority that came to light. “I kept hearing how much organizations doing similar work needed spaces to come together, so I’m working on facilitating those spaces for connection, resource sharing, and monthly networking.” Lil says. So far, they have started to facilitate monthly meetings for various community organizers in the neighbourhood. “I think it’s very cool when you’re trying to create spaces where people can form relationships and have important conversations. These conversations lead to collaborative action” Lil explains. 

One outcome from building these community connections is the establishment of a weekly Art Hive. “That’ll be a community space for everyone who exists in Milton Park to come together and make some art, which I’m really excited about,” Lil shares. “I’m working on community events that put coexistence into practice. The Art Hive is a part of that, as well as more volunteer and internship opportunities for students with local organizations.” All these efforts – focused on different segments of the community – are functioning together to create circles of mutually supportive and self-reinforcing relationships, connection, collaboration, and action. 

“By facilitating spaces, I actually get to put a lot of what I’ve been working on and learning for the past three years into practice like hosting workshops, events, spaces, and trainings,” Lil explains. “That’s sometimes scary because they are not always going to go perfectly, and it’s going to be perpetually iterative. Being content with that can be difficult. I’m learning how to celebrate the wins, but then also pay attention to what isn’t going well so that I can improve it next time.”

The Pathy Foundation Fellowship emphasizes personal sustainability and self-care as fundamentally important to the Fellowship experience. “It’s a really crucial part of your life to be thinking about these things, I had a coaching session a week ago where I was encouraged to reframe the societally fed structure I’ve had on productivity,” Lil shares. 

With personal leadership coaching, Fellows tap into and enhance their capacities as an individual and leader. They set and achieve areas of personal growth and development and build competencies that will serve them for life. 

Lil describes personal success in community engagement work as “feeling good and balanced while doing this work. It’s shifting how we view community work and work in general so that people can do the work they care about for as long as they want to be doing it.” 

To learn more about Lil’s Pathy Fellowship initiative, or the Pathy Foundation Fellowship, please visit www.PathyFellowship.com.