0:06 Right now the crisis we're in, is like kind of a perfect storm. 0:17 There, my name is Isaac Copeland, and I'm a researcher. I do research on homelessness, and particularly youth homelessness and then I also work as an instructor at Ryerson University where I teach a class called Homelessness in Canadian Society. So I'm sort of just like, a passionate and nerdy, like, I don't know, youth homelessness, dude, I guess I don't know. When I was growing up, my older sister, at the time was called Tara Runaway. And so now, they would probably say that she was a young person experiencing homelessness. In the youth sector, we see it all the time where there's like young people who maybe wouldn't have been in the in a shelter 20 years ago, were don't have any other options. There's people that are displaced in the shelter system, who really, I don't think would have been here 20 years ago, if we were to look at the same demographics. For me, it was something that I was really passionate about seeing change in and at the same time, I was sort of myself, I was fairly recent so I took the class in 2010 and four years later, I was teaching it. So I ended up back, working in a in a large youth organization and doing research and evaluation this whole time. So for the last five years now, I've been teaching Illnesses in Canadian Society and I think it's nice to have a class that that's like an extension of your beliefs. Like in your system of thinking and the way in a lot of ways, I think the way that I learn, and the way that I think about the world, I'm able to put that into the class and the way that I teach. The experience of homelessness in and of itself is a range of experiences and so that's why I even use that terminology of like person experiencing homelessness, instead of just saying, like a homeless person or the homeless. Because what's more important to me is like the person and the individual, and how they mediate those things is going to be different, depending on stop thinking so much about how people made individual choices to get into those circumstances and more about why the circumstances exist. And what are those big structures that facilitate a gross injustice like we are right now. We all have that shared humanity and there's like a level of dignity, a level of respect, a level of, I guess, just acknowledgement that people like deserve as people. And I think, a really big part of the course for me, if nothing else, is to kind of humanize the issue of homelessness. Because this sense that people can be treated less, basically less than human in a lot of ways like there's a there's a sense that they don't have to follow the same, or they don't have the same rules apply to them as people who are housed. And it's as a product of them being homeless. There's a lot of ways that you can point to environmental and social degradation and harm that's come from this, like intense inequality that's existing right now. And so I'd say it's even more concerning moving into the winter. Like we started to get like worried there's been eight deaths in the last little while and it's been a huge cause to call an emergency and unlock additional services. People like Kathy Crowe at Ryerson are really spearheading that. As much as like a like, I would say, take the course I'd say there's like, there's great things to learn from the course around like organizing and around just even maybe a way of thinking about the world that might be slightly different from from other courses. There's like a grounding of this course in lived experience and by that I mean that we bring in folks from these communities, almost every class. Our class is three hours a week and it's for like a number of weeks and I think it's it had an effect on me. And I hear from a lot of other folks that it's had an effect on them. And the you know, I think that impact is great, but ultimately, it's sort of what you do in the rest of those days between the class and after the class and what you choose to do afterwards. It's going to be the most influential on how you live your life and the change that that gets made. So I mean, like, yeah, take the class, but the class alone isn't gonna change anything and I think it depends how you how you see the world and how you see your own position. 5:06 I think for me, it's like, if there's one thing, it's just that like, people experiencing homelessness are human. They're like they deserve, like rights. They would deserve respect. Like, it's not just my responsibility as some random dude who took like a really big academic and like, professional interest in this, but like, in all of our jobs, no matter what we do. There's probably going to be an instance where was set up with a decision that's going to influence other people that are vulnerable. So how are we approaching those issues when it's our own personal responsibility? Like we can't all be like heroes out there doing everything, but I think we can all do something. I don't think anybody in society should be without housing. Like we have enough. We have enough resources that we could house everyone.