Since then, it has been Skye’s goal to turn a terrible experience into a punchline. The 29-year-old has only been in stand-up for two years, but has already pushed the boundaries of traditional comedy by weaving issues like racism, violence, and gender equity into clever jokes. She’s the co-founder and co-producer of Bad Bitches, a feminist stand-up collective that regularly holds shows at the downtown Toronto venue Comedy Bar, and a member of Manifest Destiny’s Child, a ragtag collective of Indigenous women comedians.

“I was like, ‘I need to write the funniest joke about missing and murdered Indigenous women,’” she says, “because the second someone tries to talk about it, and do it wrong, other comics will then be like, ‘Well you can’t talk about that because Courtney already did.’”

Approaching a topic this serious with humour just wouldn’t make sense for most people. But Skye believes in the power of stand-up to push issues to the forefront. In discussing them in her comedy, she’s getting the audience to confront real social issues that they otherwise might ignore. And for those directly affected by these issues, it provides an opportunity to heal through laughter.

For Skye, the dark humour—and the heartening, supportive messages behind it—comes naturally. She has done frontline work that has exposed her to the frightening realities of life—poverty, suicide, gendered violence, racism— and those experiences have found their way into her work as a comedian, a job where many field racism, homophobia, and misogyny regularly.

This humour stems from her personal life, too. In 2008, a friend of Skye’s was murdered. “People didn’t value her, because in her missing poster she was wearing Indigenous regalia,” Skye says. “I don’t think I ever really have known how much that’s changed my perspective.” In a way, Skye’s humour is a form of reconciliation with the tragedies that she’s witnessed in her frontline work and that have affected her personally.

Skye, who is Mohawk Turtle Clan, grew up in Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, in Ontario. She lived there until she graduated from high school and moved to Sudbury, Ont., to study police foundations at Cambrian College.

Two years ago, she landed work in Toronto. She would spend her day doing 9-to-5 work, then commute all the way back to Six Nations where she would often be up until 3 a.m. doing volunteer firefighting. When she couldn’t keep up with the exhausting pace, she moved to downtown Toronto.

Eventually, Skye became bored with her sudden free time and signed up for Comedy Girl, a class by Dawn Whitwell, one of the pioneers of Toronto’s thriving feminist comedy scene. With a group of other women in the class, she co-founded Bad Bitches. “I wanted something that was super feminist and could walk that line between PC and not offensive, but allowing women the space to be blue and to be crude, and to be graphic, and to be gross,” she says.

Bad Bitches, Skye says, have an unapologetically intersectional feminist approach. A typical show might feature anything from period jokes to risky jabs about how often women are killed at the hands of men for rejecting them. It’s a far cry from the typical “bro” atmosphere that one expects at a traditional stand-up show.

“I think white men only persevere in stand-up because they have so much cognitive dissonance about what is going on,” she says. In fact, she hopes straight white men feel uncomfortable with her sets—they’re rarely the butt of the joke in comedy, but rather the ones joking about already marginalized group.

With Bad Bitches, and Skye’s other stand-up shows, these norms and stereotypes are being shattered. “I’ve never gone out intentionally to spite white men, I’ve never gone out intentionally trying to rile them,” says Skye, “but they occupy a place of privilege and when you’re challenging a privilege, when you’re challenging the system, they perceive that as a personal threat.”

Skye’s work may seem contradictory—stand-up is probably one of the last things someone would think of when it comes to talking about racism, sexism, and violence. But that’s the essence of Skye’s work: confronting the scary realities in life, and making people laugh about them as a form of healing and reconciling with these realities. In her line of work, laughter really is the best medicine.

“Advocacy is really not about me in my mind—it’s about everybody else,” he says.

For the past four years, Nyuurnibe has been speaking at schools, summits, TEDx, and even the World Health Organization. He’s made it his mission to speak up against mental health struggles and break the stigma so no one ever has to feel the way he did five years ago when he tried to take his own life.

Before he was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and anxiety, Nyuurnibe felt like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. In 2012, Nyuurnibe was in his third year at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., studying aquatic resources and political science. Though he was active on campus and gave tours to incoming students, he was struggling. Some days, he couldn’t get out of bed. “I basically wasn’t able to go to classes, get assignments in on time, wasn’t able to talk about what I was feeling,” he says. “No one was talking about mental health at the time.” Feeling helpless, he tried to take his life, and was hospitalized. After being released from the hospital, Nyuurnibe started to wonder why no one was talking about mental health and decided to take matters into his own hands. It’s what he says was the first sign of hope.

But this revelation didn’t make things any easier. For one, he couldn’t return back to school. “There were a lot of issues, especially with my father. He was in charge of taking care of my tuition and wasn’t able to fulfill that. He had no idea about my mental state until things got as bad as they did,” says Nyuurnibe. The school, he says, also just didn’t know how to respond to his situation: “It wasn’t handled in the best way.” Everything about it—in particular, the initial visit by a campus counsellor and her hurtful attitude—was horribly managed, says Nyuurnibe.

People started to notice he wasn’t at school anymore. That’s when an editor at the school newspaper, The Xavieran Weekly, asked Nyuurnibe to write an article and share his story—his first step to becoming an advocate. “Writing that article meant coming to terms with something I’d been dealing with for a while. Something I had quite frankly been ashamed of,” he says. After the article was published, people he had known during his time at St. Francis Xavier came up to admit to him that they, too, were struggling with their mental health. In some cases, Nyuurnibe was the first person they told.

“My worry was that somebody else besides me would go through this,” Nyuurnibe says. “I guess that’s what up to this day keeps pushing me.”

Since then, he’s been pushing for mental health advocacy and change. Nyuurnibe believes that the new generation of young people will be the ones to push for and see policy changes within the country.

That’s why he champions the work he does with Toronto-based youth mental health advocacy group, Jack.org. The organization’s mandate is to transform the way we look at mental health by opening up the conversation with young leaders from high schools and universities across Canada. Each year Jack.org hosts a summit that gathers 200 young leaders, and in 2016, Nyuurnibe was the host—a shining moment for him since he had shared his story at the first summit back in 2013.

For Nyuurnibe, being an advocate means constantly thinking of a new way to get his message across. His latest project in the works is called Dance for Depression, aninitiative he hopes will bring the mental health conversation into an arena that’s comfortable for everyone through music. As a lover of electronic music and dance, he’s aiming to get musicians involved and people moving.

Though Nyuurnibe thinks the conversation around mental health in Canada has come a long way since he attempted suicide in 2012, he says there’s still work to be done. “There’s been a lot of talk, which is great,” he says. “But it has to start building up the the point where action leads to services and to people getting the right care. I think we’re on the right track.”

While some universities have improved their student mental health services, Nyuurnibe says one of the biggest challenges still facing many institutions is funding. But he’s taking action. In October, he met with Health Minister Jane Philpott on Parliament Hill to discuss funding around mental health.

When asked what his plans were for the next five years, Nyuurnibe can count them on and on. Among the top: graduate from a journalism program at Nova Scotia Community College, cut down the wait time for access to mental health services on campuses, increase funding, ultimately normalize the conversation by continuing to get his message out there. “It’s not just built on one story, it’s built on the story of many people,” says Nyuurnibe. “One life lost is one life too many.”

Founded in 1966, the BPP ran a number of community-oriented programs, from free breakfasts for kids to accompanying seniors afraid of being mugged at night. Its approach to police violence involved carrying guns while observing law-enforcement; this tactic has lived on most vibrantly in the popular consciousness. But children were an integral aspect of the BPP’s project. Yet merely ensuring their success within the white-controlled educational system wouldn’t do. It’s what inspired the group to launch liberation schools for youth of colour.

Fifty years later, a similar motivation guides LeRoi Newbold, a member of the Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) steering committee and director of the group’s own Freedom School. The school began in July 2016, bringing in 20 kids for three weeks of arts-focused education on Black history, political resistance, and state violence.

In late October 2016, Newbold was finishing preparations for a Halloween party that would allow the kids to dress up as important historical and modern Black figures—from Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman whose central role in the Stonewall Rebellion is often ignored, to Dutty Boukman, a Jamaican fighter in the Haitian Revolution. As with the Freedom School’s curriculum, the party was designed to integrate learning with play. “There’s a lot of pretty violent things happening to Black kids and Black youth in education,” Newbold says, “in terms of being channeled into behavioural classes, kind of culturally inappropriate and disengaging curriculum.”

Dropout rates for Black students in Toronto are significantly higher than for other racial demographics, as are suspension and expulsion rates. Newbold, who works at the Toronto District School Board’s Africentric Alternative School, points to those stats as evidence of the school system’s failure, and evidence that a community-involved approach is needed. Newbold hopes to impart three key lessons through the Freedom School: that Black children know their lives matter, that they are capable of complex thought and analysis, and that they will be victorious in the battles against hatred and bigotry. Newbold, for example, teaches kids that resistance works, from the founding of Haiti, which started as a slave revolt, to future victories over oppression. Combined, these lessons provide a way of seeing oneself and the world both as it is and as it can be: a process to unpack what’s happening in many of their lives, a foundation of self-love, and an optimism borne of historical precedent.

Freedom School was developed with significant direction from parents, and places a premium on community and parental involvement. In return, Newbold said the project has received mostly positive support, though not from all corners. For one, when Newbold approached an all-girls’ school about using their space, administration suggested the children wouldn’t be able to grasp the “abstract concepts” in the curriculum.

But children are more than capable of understanding complex ideas if given the proper tools, Newbold noted. Most importantly, many of the concepts that school called abstract—classism, trans feminism, Black liberation, police violence—are already affecting kids across Toronto. To Newbold, that makes it all the more vital to provide children with space to understand the world around them.

Arts-based teaching at Freedom School is engaging, a necessary tactic for any educational approach. And it allows the kids to be kids, to have fun and use their imaginations. They used stop-motion animation in a lesson about the Haitian Revolution, and capoeira lessons to talk about the Malê Revolt in Brazil.

Some teachers who may be white and middle-class fail to see how outside factors affect the children in their care, expecting their charges to come into each day with a full stomach and uncluttered mind, which is simply not the case for many children. Creating an educational space that considers those other factors, and plans for them, is among Newbold’s long-term goals.

The Black Panther Party’s school program lived on past the party itself, and Newbold said they have similar goals for the longevity of Freedom School. In the short term they want to show young people that they are a valued group in the fight for liberation, welcome and necessary. Over a longer timeline, Newbold said they want to create more alternative educational models in Canada.

“I constantly hear about how ‘Black kids are not doing as well in education because parents aren’t as available,’ or we don’t have the resources in our community. These are not the reasons we’re not being successful,” Newbold says, pointing to failures on the part of educators. They want to change that.

Her advocacy for those who have experienced sexual violence at UBC began in January 2014. About two years prior, she says she witnessed inappropriate behaviour by a graduate student and alerted school administration to it. “When I first observed him, he was touching a woman without her consent, but not her breasts, ass, or head. So it was relatively ‘subtle’ even though her body language was extremely unhappy,” she says. The incident was reportedly not a one-off. The student, Dmitry Mordvinov, is accused of having assaulted at least seven women on campus. (None of the allegations have been proven.)

Kirchmeier approached UBC’s Equity Inclusion Office with what she witnessed. Mordvinov remained at the school, and she wasn’t satisfied with the response. In March 2016, Kirchmeier filed a complaint with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, as an individual and on behalf of anyone who has filed a complaint of any alleged sexual misconduct at the west-coast university.

It was not until CBC’s The Fifth Estate aired the episode “School of Secrets” on November 23, 2015, reporting on Mordvinov’s actions that the university took action. Mordvinov was quietly expelled. (Mordvinov told CBC he would be appealing the expulsion.) The women he is reported to have assaulted were not alerted by the school but learned of his expulsion through media reports. “I think it’s obscene that it takes an hour-long documentary to expel an abuser,” Kirchmeier says.

Now, Kirchmeier has become an confidant for women who have experienced sexual violence on campus. The majority of women who have come to her with their experiences and grievances against the school have done so because of media coverage. “Sometimes they reach out and then are not ready to continue, or it triggers them. Some have shared their stories and then moved on. It really depends,” she says. “We’re still figuring all this out.” Grievances reported to her, she adds, are from as early as the 1990s and they are “pretty continuous from that point on.”

Kirchmeier wants to see a system in place that protects students who speak with school administration about campus sexual violence. Too often in the past, she says, these complaints, and complainants, are brushed off. A Sexual Assault Response Team (SART), which provides comprehensive care to victims in crisis, is a reasonable request of the school by students, Kirchmeier says. “Nothing I’m proposing is out of the realm of what students request,” she adds.

The university says they do offer SART services, but they are only available through Vancouver General Hospital. Furthermore, the response team only provides services to complete a rape kit process.

Many survivors say UBC’s process, or lack thereof, has caused students who have experienced sexual violence more harm than good. “The attack itself didn’t make me a victim; this process has made me a victim of procedure and of bureaucracy,” Caitlin Cunningham, a woman allegedly attacked by Mordvinov on campus, told CBC News. “And I got lost in the mess of it all. I mean, the system is broken from start to finish.”

There is no precedent for what Kirchmeier is fighting for, and this is not a cookie-cutter case. The legal process is slow and she faces a university with an in-house legal team. Meanwhile, Mordvinov is back home in Russia. Since the university’s structure of command is intentionally unclear, there is no measure of accountability. “So if you look at the Equity office’s structure, it isn’t clear exactly what each person does,” Kirchmeier says.

In the meantime, Kirchmeier continues to advocate for sexual assault survivors. As a white woman growing up in the United States, Kirchmeier became interested in power dynamics. In the past she has worked with Planned Parenthood and acted in a production of The Vagina Monologues. She sees her current activism parallel to that of her past as it all pertains to body autonomy. Back at UBC, Kirchmeier says all but one professor have refused to support her case. Outside of the university, she has the support of her family, especially her mother. After graduating in 2013, Kirchmeier moved back home to Washington. She says that Vancouver is a company town, and one that is influenced by UBC. Living in Washington, she knows her employability will not be affected the same way others who are still living in B.C. may be. Because UBC has such a ubiquitous presence in the city, she says it’s hard to find a job when you’re critical of the school.

Kirchmeier is aware that it is difficult to be an activist, but she wants to rise to the occasion and honour the work of other women with this opportunity. She would like to see a university where women can fully access their education free of discrimination and violence.

A mediation session between Kirchmeier and UBC was held on October 24, 2016. However, the parties did not reach an agreement. The complaint process will move forward— and Kirchmeier is ready.

Gurza, a disability awareness consultant since 2012, has made it his mission to get Canadians to stop, think about, and discuss how people with disabilities are portrayed in society—including their sexuality and desires. Since the launch of his website, AndrewGurza.com, in January 2015, his message is slowly making its way to folks both in Canada and across the world.

People with disabilities face a number of challenges. One hurdle Gurza has faced is that society largely views disabled folks as undesirable or asexual beings. “Sex and disability make most people uncomfortable because they haven’t had the chance to see disabled people sexualized in a way that gives them agency over their bodies and their experiences,” he says. As a result, Gurza has spent considerable time over the past four years crafting his voice. He has worked tirelessly to reclaim words such as “disabled” and “crippled.” Through social media and his blog, he provides readers with insight on the real disabled experience. “It is never really seen as something normative and accepted at all,” he says.

In February 2015, Gurza launched Disability After Dark, a weekly podcast dedicated to disability and sex. He talks frankly about everything from sex and sexuality, desire, devotion, accessibility, sexual identity, and queer culture, and often invites guests on the show to share their experiences. In a recent episode, “Accessing Anal,” Gurza discusses the inaccessibility of anal sex to a person with disabilities, using himself as the example. Its open and honest format has paid off: The podcast has reached nearly 6,000 downloads since its inception.

Gurza also speaks across North America about disability, on topics ranging from body image issues to long-term care. “Being a disability awareness consultant, I want people aware of what the disabled experience—what my experience—as a queer disabled man feels like,” he says. “I want to bring everyone into my experiences and give them a seat at my table.”

It’s hard to deny that while Gurza’s voice is valuable for the disability community in general, it is extraordinarily valuable and necessary in the queer community. As a queer man, he’s aware of the “homonormative ideal,” which assumes that all queer people must conform to certain ideal beauty standards or fit certain stereotypes. From being flamboyant and feminine to having huge muscles and a beard, these ideals have plagued Gurza throughout his life, and he has been confronted with an incredible amount of ableism and discrimination from within the community. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt,” he says. “It burns each and every time.” From being asked blatant questions about his body (“Does your penis work?”), to being unable to access queer spaces both physically and emotionally, much of this has fueled Gurza’s work. “I use the tough parts [of my own life] to bolster my mission of shining a light on the reality of disability,” Gurza says.

Gurza has embraced his status as a kinky cripple who has worked overtime to dispel the myths that plague those who have disabilities. “What I am trying to do in my work is shine a light on what disability is really like for me,” he explains. “There are days when living as a disabled person isn’t awesome, and no matter how much positivity you use, nothing will change that.” He believes that by showing Canadians the emotional side of disability, they will have a better understanding of how disability affects folks in all aspects of their lives. Most recently, a parent who listened to Gurza’s podcast wrote in to say that because of him, they now had the words to talk to their disabled teenager about sex. “When I read that, I was bowled over. I mean, it doesn’t get much better than that,” he says.

This year, Gurza is challenging himself to something different: he’s in the midst of writing a book proposal based on his blogs and planning a lecture series based on his podcast series. “I want my voice to be among the many disabled people, to bring disability that much closer to the mainstream,” he says. Gurza may just be the voice to end the stigma and make you look at disability differently

The multidisciplinary artist went on to become the city’s grand slam champion and competed at Canada’s national youth poetry festival. Now, as Edmonton’s second-ever Youth Poet Laureate, Adem is working to spread her love of poetry, literature, and the arts to other youth in the city.

Drawing from personal experiences growing up—from trying to fit in as the new kid in school to navigating her identities as a Black, queer, Muslim woman—Adem, now 22, is using her one-year term to speak to students and encourage them to tell their own stories. In classrooms across Edmonton, she conducts workshops and asks students about their lives—who they are and where they’ve come from, what they’re scared of and what they want to say. “I think the answers to those questions are poems,” she says. “When they’re true and honest, they’re always poems.”

Adem says it is important to empower students, reminding them that their voices are valuable and worth listening to. She recalls tuning out in high school because she couldn’t relate to the material being taught. Learning about poetry meant learning about concepts like metre and stress, not the emotional element of the form. “I felt very detached from human speech and its relationship to poetry,” she says. Instead, Adem took refuge in writing personal essays, working out her anxiety and depression by turning her frustrations into something tangible. Only later—outside of the classroom—did she turn to poetry. “I say that poetry saved my life and I don’t really take that lightly,” she says. “Using poetry as a way to heal and as a voice for trauma to make them real is another thing I strive to encourage and work through with students.”

Her more recent works have focused on redefining and reimagining identities surrounding race, sexuality, faith, and gender. Adem cites her mother, who raised her as a single mom, as a strong influence in her poetry. “Recognizing my mother’s humanity has been the key to me readily recognizing my humanity and everybody else’s,” she says. Adem always thought of her mother’s strength as indestructible; but as she got older, Adem began to recognize how the world affects her mother, and how that affects their relationship. Viewing her mother outside of her parental role taught Adem empathy and perspective. “It forces me to always think about my audience and to think about how my words are affecting other people,” she says.

For the past few years, Adem spent parts of her summers in New York, slamming and collaborating with other poets in the city. Taking cues from the vibrancy of the scene and inspired by the artists she met, Adem returned to Edmonton determined to bring some of those lessons back. “It’s helped me look at my community here and be able to see what’s missing and what’s not,” says Adem. During a trip last summer, Adem was inspired to write one of her favourite poems. She was walking home when she spotted a young Black girl practicing choreography on a street corner in Brooklyn. “This girl was [going] full-out, like not a care in the world,” Adem recalls. “She reminded me a lot of myself when I was around her age.” Adem later wrote Birthright, a poem discussing the experiences of Black women and children. The piece asks: “What do we owe our babies if not the same safety as the womb?” “It made me think critically about how much longer she will be afforded that carefree-ness,” she says.

In 2015, Adem founded Sister 2 Sister, a bimonthly artistic showcase for and by women of colour. Tired of participating in shows that lacked diversity both in performers and audience, she longed to create a safe space for other marginalized artists like her in the community. Next year, Adem hopes to expand the showcase to offer services and workshops for artists looking to learn how to make a sustainable living. She is also an artistic associate at the Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre, where she is curating Edmonton’s first-ever Black Arts Matters festival. The new three-day arts festival will bring together Black artists from across disciplines in an event that will include performances, workshops, and panels.

In the future, Adem sees herself moving to New York, a dream she’s had since she was a child. A true artist, she still wants to act, write plays, and record an album. But for now, she is determined to finish what she has started in Edmonton. “I want to make sure that when I leave, I’m not leaving other people like me with nothing,” she says. “I want to make sure there’s a safe space here for the artists of colour—they’re my priority.”

Thinking back to her high-school self—that young woman who took the stage some three years ago—Adem wishes she had opened herself up to the world of arts sooner: “If I had stopped apologizing for who I am, what I wore, the way I spoke, what I ate, and how loud I was, I would have been a lot freer a lot earlier.”