Toronto Area Solidarity Summer Alliance (TASSA) supports South Asian and Indo-Caribbean youth and allies to learn and practice skills to organize our friends, peers, families, neighbours, and community members to think about the systems that affect our lives, build solidarities with each other, and take collective action for community liberation.
We accomplish this by 1) hosting summer education and community organizing training events that help youth participants sharpen critical analysis and develop collective leadership and community organizing skills to create change and realize justice with, in, and for our communities, 2) stewarding a yearlong youth fellowship that supports youth cohort members to deepen knowledge of issues and skills to build youth power in our movements, and 3) learning together with fellow BIPOC and working-class youth to build unity and solidarity in our struggles to build the worlds we want.
“South Asian” and “Indo-Caribbean” can refer to a person who has roots in what is now Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and regions beyond these current bordered boundaries. This also includes people whose ancestors migrated from places in “South Asia” and built communities in other places - including but not limited to: Canada, Fiji, Guyana, Italy, Jamaica, Kenya, Mauritius, the Persian Gulf, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, Uganda, the USA, and many places in between. We recognize that there are many ways people describe their racial and ethnic identities (e.g., Brown, West Indian, Muslim, Kashmiri, Eelam Tamil, Panjabi, Sikh, mixed-race, Tamil, Sindhi, desi, Gujarati, etc.) and welcome all who identify as having roots in, or a diasporic connection to, these and identities mentioned.