Mike Perry grew up in Fenelon Falls, Ontario. He’s still there, showing up to the community meetings most people leave early, running a family health team that helps keep the health care lights on for rural patients, and serving as the City Councillor for Ward 3 where he has been named in the media as “a force to be reckoned with.”
Mike has spent his life learning and sharing, including with Métis National Council, Marshall Ganz at Harvard, CLC’s Labour College, and at Trent University. He has provided leadership and organizing training to students, labour leaders, health care workers, political and union candidates, survivors of sexual violence, Indigenous governments, migrant workers, and recently, USAID and AmeriCorps workers fired by Trump.
Mike and his children — Abigail and Gabe — are proud citizens of the Métis Nation of Ontario.
Mike’s Activate Session: Rallying Love Warriors: “How We Gonna Win, If We Ain’t Right Within?”
We pour enormous energy into mobilizing, organizing, messaging, and digital tools — all necessary. But we rarely make space for the harder existential questions: What kind of person is this work asking me to become? What am I myself carrying into this work? Is it costing others – and the goal – when I haven’t done my own work first? This session together strives to offer something unique that is genuinely useful to organizers who may be burning out, feeling excluded, tired of finding themselves in fractured coalitions and conflict, or worried the movement is too dysfunctional to succeed. Some concrete tools will be co-developed, in a brave space, for the internal work that helps us love across difference and resistance and sustain our movements under pressure — not as a soft complement to transformative solidarity, but as its precondition.
“How we gonna win if we ain’t right within?” – Lauryn Hill