2022 Equality Breakfast

We loved sharing a unique virtual Breakfast for Dinner celebration with our community on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2022. It was the Equality Breakfast you know and love, now for the second year in the evening and on Zoom!

We were heartened by how many of you joined us for a joyous, thought-provoking, and inspiring evening, alongside keynote Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and emcee Michelle Eliot.

Check out our event program to learn more about our inspiring speakers and partners this year.

Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Time: 6:30-7:45 p.m. (virtual doors at 6:15 p.m.)

Location: Zoom

Featuring live CART captioning and ASL interpretation

Keynote speaker: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Author, disability and transformative justice culture and movement worker

Image description: A nonbinary femme with sand colored skin, purple and brown curly hair and purple lipstick smiles in front of a rocky riverbed.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a nonbinary femme disabled and autistic writer and disability and transformative justice cultural and movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician Romani ascent.

They are the author or co-editor of nine books, including Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and Bodymap. A Lambda Award winner who has been shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle five times, they are the 2020 Jean Cordova Award winner “honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer experience,” and are a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow.

Raised in rustbelt central Massachusetts and shaped by T’karonto and Oakland, they currently make their home in South Seattle, Duwamish territories.

Their next book, The Future is Disabled, is forthcoming in fall 2022.

Emcee: Michelle Eliot

Michelle Eliot is an award-winning journalist and the host of CBC British Columbia’s weekday call-in show, BC Today, where she engages in conversation with listeners on the day’s top stories and on issues important to British Columbians.

Eliot has hosted numerous CBC news specials, including election and provincial budget coverage on both local and network programs. She has also tapped into her Filipino heritage as part of CBC’s Mabuhay B.C., an ongoing initiative to share stories from the province’s Filipino community.

Eliot has been recognized by the The Radio Television Digital News Association and the Jack Webster Foundation for stories that delved into the opioid crisis in B.C., the immigrant experience in Canada, and for coverage of the 2017 NDP-Green deal for a minority government in B.C.

Learn more about Michelle.

About the event

This was West Coast LEAF’s only fundraiser of the year and your support went directly into changing the laws, policies and systems that harm the most marginalized people. Together, we can co-create a society that is just, equitable, and free from discrimination.

While we missed tucking into poached eggs and copious coffee bright and early in a lush ballroom at Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, we were excited to gather with you online and welcome those who are geographically distant and who might not have been able to attend in person.

We respectfully acknowledge that this event was organized on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded homelands of xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations—where many of us are uninvited settlers. We ask you to join us in uplifting the work of Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in resisting ongoing colonial and misogynistic violence and injustice.

Silent Auction

Another bonus to holding our event virtually is that we went online with our beloved silent auction. The auction raised over $14,156 – a big success thanks to all of our eager bidders and generous community of goods and services donors!

Partner with the 2022 Equality Breakfast for Dinner

Our annual Equality Breakfast is possible each year only because of the generous support of our Partners. Partnership is a highly visible way to demonstrate that you value gender inclusion and diversity in leadership, are committed to social responsibility, support access to justice for all, and want to see a more equal and just BC! Thank you to this year’s incredible Partners!