2STGD+ Action Plan Renewal

Statement Watch

GOOD MORNING, MAYOR AND COUNCIL, MARGARET WHITKINS, GENERAL MANAGER, ARTS, CULTURE AND COMMUNITY SERVICES. TODAY WE ARE PLEASED TO BE HERE TO PRESENT YOU WITH AN OVERVIEW OF THE UPDATE TO THE 2 STGD PLUS SAFETY AND INCLUSION ACTION PLAN. THIS WORK IS THE RESULT OF A MOTION PUT FORWARD BY COUNCIL IN NOVEMBER OF 2023. Staff have worked across departments, as well as with other municipal departments, such as VPL and Park Board, to bring forward a proposal outlining pragmatic actions that can be undertaken in 2026 and with a plan to report back to Council on progress annually. I will now hand the presentation over to April Freytag-Sumter and Sonia Bianchi from Social Policy and Projects to walk you through the report.

Statement Watch

Good morning, Marin Council. I'm pleased to be here to present on the 2S TGD Plus Safety and Inclusion Action Plan. My name is April Sumter-Frytag. I go by both April and Sumter. I use she, her, and they, their pronouns. And I work on the Community and Gender Safety Team in ACCS. Social Policy and Projects, where my focus is sex workers' safety and inclusion, gender equity centered around the City of Reconciliation framework. And I am the project lead for the renewal of the 2S TGD Plus Safety and Inclusion Action Plan. I would like to thank community members for their generosity in sharing their expertise and lived experience, and honor two STGD Plus community members who are no longer with us, whose advocacy laid the foundation for this work, and whose voices with communities are reflected throughout this plan. I also want to acknowledge the Cross-Departmental Working Group whose collaboration was essential, and the work I am presenting today is a team effort. On this slide, you will see the image. And it's the visual image that we used during our internal and external engagement. And each element carries a significance. You'll see the colors of the trans flag. You'll see feathers appearing as a watermark to honor and uplift Two-Spirit inclusion, the hands representing the diversity of two STGD plus communities, and the hearts symbolizing care, the care we carried throughout this process with community and lived experience staff. and signaling the city's commitment to caring about the safety and inclusion of two STGD plus communities. Next slide. Thank you. I'm also just going to acknowledge and thank Sonia, who is doing our slide deck for me. And note that I am visually impaired. I cannot see the slides above here. I'm referring to copies here. My range of vision, I can see Councillor Maloney, almost councillors though. And I don't have peripheral vision. So if I need a cue, I might need a visual cue or you might see me just actually really turning around to see what's going on. Great. All right. So the council member motion from November 23 was to renew the 2STGD Plus action plan focused on safety and inclusion, to engage with partners, advisory committees, community leaders, and organization, and to ensure plans, resources, and engagements were available in multiple languages. The plan is connected to the council city strategic priorities through Vibrant Vancouver, through the objectives of number one, a vibrant and diverse community, number two, housing, number five, safety and security, number seven, being healthy and inclusive and equitable, and number eight, work on reconciliation. The equity framework is also involved in our process, and that's an internal process about getting our house in order as we work on equity issues, and you'll see this through our plan, through our goal HR and staff experiences. The city of reconciliation framework has part of the work that we've done. We've had a focus on urban Indigenous engagement, and we're connected to the work on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, commitment to work with diverse Indigenous communities. We're also connected to the healthy city strategy that you saw in council fairly recently, and I'll be talking about that a little bit later in the presentation. Next slide. We're going to talk a bit about the background. So you'll see, oh, excellent. The timeline here is in 2016, the city working with community and partners developed the original 2016 action plan. In 2023, there was the council member motion to renew. In 2024, we formed internal working group, conducted initial engagement. In 2024, staff reported back with an update memo to council. And 2025 to present, I'll be talking about in the rest of the presentation, but there has been significant work from the 2016 plan that you can see in the memo that we received, we delivered to council in December of 2024. There's also a note on the acronym. You'll see that there are various names that we have used for this plan and strategy over the years, and based on community feedback and evolving language since 2016, the acronym TGV2S and other variations have been updated to 2STGD+, to refer to two-spirit, transgender, and gender-diverse plus communities. As community members have unique relationships with different terms, the plus is a way to be inclusive and to support self-determination. In this report, the term 2STGD plus will be used, and one of the early initiatives of the action plan is to work to create consistency and alignment of terminology in all of City of Vancouver initiatives. Next slide. Thank you. I'm going to talk a little bit about why this work matters. You'll see some statistics up on the slide there. And we're just noting that there's been a considerable rise in hate crimes. There's disproportionate levels of poverty, barriers to employment. And these are reflecting national statistics that have been reinforced by what we saw in our engagement data as communities spoke to incidents of violence and harassment, experiencing economic inequity, and lack of access to housing. In July 2016, Bill 27 amended the BC Human Rights Code to include gender identity or expression among protective grounds, making discrimination on this basis illegal. Unfortunately, as we did this work, there were some transphobic comments when we did our online engagements. And as we have seen, there are recent legislative shifts in other jurisdictions and internationally where some established protections for two STGD plus individuals have been challenged. This emphasizes the importance of doing this work in the current environment. Next slide. Thank you. I'm going to talk a bit about the process for the action plan and the internal engagement. Between 2024 and 2025, the project engaged more than 800 community members through public advisory committee sessions, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, surveys, outreach activities, and an in-person report-back event. The TGD2S Roundtable brought us insights from housing and service providers and lived experience community consultants, facilitators, and we had the support of a Two-Spirit elder. We translated material to support language accessibility and participation across diverse communities. These included multilingual materials available in five languages. We offered hard copy survey options at in-person events and outreach tables to ensure participation for those with barriers to digital access. The project applied a relationship-focused engagement model focusing on intentional ways of connecting with community with care given to confidentiality, accessibility needs, cultural safety, and community dynamics. Community members had roles as connectors and supported hosting outreach events, facilitating groups, and shared survey and engagement opportunities. Even with the success of this engagement, we don't feel we've reached everyone in the 2STGD Plus community, so there's still more room to build community connections. Our internal process included a jurisdictional scan of best practices, where I would have to say that Vancouver did show up as a global leader in this work. The project team had staff connectors who worked on developing action within goals areas. We connected with the two STGD Plus related employee resource groups from the City of Vancouver and Vancouver Public Library. And we had a really great partnership with Parks. Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation staff invited us to join community-centered events, including activities for Trans Day Remembrance and All Ages Post-Swim Ice Cream Social, and they helped promote our action plan activities and extend community outreach. We also had sessions with the City of Vancouver Public Advisory Committees, where we connected with liaisons from our city partners, the Vancouver Police Department, the Board of Parks and Recreation, Vancouver School Board, and they shared their agency's connections to this work, confirmed the synergy of our goal areas and the importance of future collaborations. Overall, the process was designed to confirm goal areas and get insights within those goals what actions would be meaningful and impactful. Next slide. I'm going to share some findings from our community engagement. As the focus of this plan is safety and inclusion, one of the key questions we asked were, do people feel safe and do they feel included? As we found, people felt they often felt safe here in the city, although there was a small group of people who said never, which is not a really good indicator, and that generally they did not feel included. So we definitely have some work to do in these areas. Other feedback involved issues and challenges related to transphobia, racism, disability, mental health services, gender-based violences, and challenges related to systemic discrimination. We have not released all of these survey findings and results, and we look forward to sharing more details from our engagement summary and project research in a What We Heard report as part of the future process. For now, I'll share a couple of quotes from survey participants. It's not so much about making a bunch of trans-specific services. It's about making sure the services that can be assessed by 99% of the society doesn't exclude trans people who need those services as well. And from another participant, they wrote to us, I am the parent of a transgender child, and we moved to Vancouver specifically because of the inclusion and openness in the city. I am proud of you for doing this and even for asking the questions. Next slide. I'm now actually going to talk about the 2STGD safety and inclusion action plan and the framework. So this is the framework which was informed by our community engagement findings and outlines our vision, mission, and goal areas. Our vision is to advance equity so that everyone feels safe, represented and included. And our mission is that the city of Vancouver reaffirms its commitment to the well-being of two-spirit transgender and gender diverse plus residents and staff and addresses systemic barriers. And we'll fall into the five goal areas that I'll talk about on the next slide. as some people might see, our goal areas fall into housing and homelessness, community spaces and safety, programs and services, visibility and engagement, and human resources and staff experiences. And through those, we have the objectives to improve housing and shelter options. create and improve public spaces welcoming to 2S TGD Plus individuals, to develop, expand, and support programs that cater to the diverse needs, to enhance visibility and better engage folks in city consultations, and to foster an inclusive and supportive work environment. Through these actions and objectives, it's going to be very important that we work with partners. The plan itself is focused on the actions within the city's jurisdiction, but collaboration will be essential as community and staff identified actions that included issues beyond the city's authority and would need to incorporate building on existing relationships with partners of all level of government. The city will need to work along the province and federal and municipal partners to address issues beyond its jurisdiction, such as health care, education, policing, employment standards, and housing. And we can do that work by sharing evidence that we have found through this and other engagements and supporting community-led efforts. The next slide is going to talk about our relation to the Healthy City Strategy and the goal areas as established in the 2STGD framework align with the Healthy City Strategy using the shared lenses of equity inclusion, reconciliation, accessibility, as well as synergy with the 12... GOAL AREAS IN THE HEALTHY CITY STRATEGIES THAT REINFORCE THE PRIORITIES OF OUR ACTION PLAN AND CREATE OPPORTUNITIES FOR INCLUSIVE DATA COLLECTION, MONITORING AND DECISION MAKING. IF YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE CHART, YOU CAN SEE THAT OUR GOAL AREAS ARE ON THE LEFT SIDE AND YOU CAN SEE HOW THEY CONNECT TO THE 12 GOAL AREAS AND THE LENSES WITH THE HEALTHY CITY STRATEGY.

NEXT SLIDE.

So there are a total of 30 actions over the five goal areas, and there's a full list of these in Appendix B, and I'm just going to do some highlights from each area. In housing, we're looking to update non-market housing operation applications, identify supports for chosen family compositions, and include TUSTGD plus welcoming language and gender identification options. Through our work, we are in community spaces and space safety. We want to integrate two STGD Plus inclusion principles into the design of city-owned washrooms and change room facilities, guided by best practice standards and community feedback. In programs and services, we want to assess opportunities to expand targeted supports for organizations, artists, art spaces, and cultural production. In visibility and engagement, we want to update the City of Vancouver's communication with inclusive language and include resources for 2STGD plus communities on Vancouver City websites. And in how HR and staff experience, we want to extend awareness by continuing to deliver existing gender diversity awareness courses. In summary, the 2STG Plus action plan works to advance safety, inclusion, and access for residents and staff by strengthening housing, services, public spaces, visibility, and workplace supports. The plan covers 2026 to early 2027 actions. As I mentioned, the 30 actions that are citywide. All actions have been framed to consider resources, impact, feasibility, city jurisdiction, and measurable outcomes. PLANS INCLUDE AN ANNUAL EVALUATION AND UPDATE REPORT, AND ACTIONS FOR 2027 AND BEYOND ARE UNDER DEVELOPMENT AS PART OF FUTURE PLANNING CONSIDERATIONS. NEXT SLIDE. There is a next slide. And I just want to thank you for your time and attention today. I appreciate the opportunity to share the overview of this work with you. Our ongoing efforts are deeply important to inclusion and safety across the city and look forward to hearing Council's feedback on the action plan and recommendations. Thank you.

Statement Watch

Hi, good morning. Brooke Malice, Director of Homelessness Services. Thank you for the question. Certainly, efforts such as access to shelter and outreach services as a gateway towards housing are opportunities that the City of Vancouver can participate in and have been. So, for example, Aoki Ross House is a city-owned site specifically for individuals from this community. And certainly there could be more. It's been a very successful site. Additionally, the tiny shelters pilot project that the city of Vancouver approved also has been a good source of accessing safe shelter for individuals from TGD2S plus communities.

And I understand that when there are budget cuts at any level of government, it's one of the first things that can be cut back on is coordination resources to connect people who need help with the services that are available. What's your feeling on the status of the coordination services reaching the people that need it?

I mean, certainly we do our best to work with our partners, both in the nonprofit sector as well as BC Housing, who has oversight jurisdiction for the shelters and the guidelines related to ensuring safe access to all individuals within the sheltering system.