The Street Solidarity Union (SSU) is a collaboration between Comm-Un Collective and Syndicat de Locataires Autonomes de Montréal - Montréal Autonomous Tenants Union (SLAM-MATU).
The goal of the initiative is to strengthen the self-advocacy among unhoused people. We gather every week in the Milton-Parc neighborhood with the goal of building relationships of solidarity between housed and unhoused people in the area. The SSU facilitates moments of connection through the trust that is built week after week. Through these relationships, we hope to identify the issues unhoused people live daily and begin organizing around them. This organizing will be shaped through these same weekly meetings and will always be led by those with first-hand experience of homelessness.
In the long term, the SSU aims to make a difference in the Montréal landscape of services for people experiencing homelessness by giving power back to the people themselves rather than through the hierarchies imposed by the city and social services.