our story
Founded by Daisy Nolasco, Thevya Balendran, and Sarah W. in 2021, kin + care collective is a community arts organization based in Scarborough. Through our work, we aim to address the lack of artistic and creative opportunities for BIPOC youth in Scarborough.
Coming from racialized, immigrant backgrounds and residing in Scarborough, we have found that we share numerous similarities among our lived experiences and upbringings - despite our different Filipina, Tamil, and Moroccan/Trinidadian roots. A commonality that we share is our commitment to portraying Scarborough in a positive light and challenging the discriminatory and racist narratives that many outsiders have about our community and its residents.
Through art, research, and relationship building, kin + care collective seeks to foster the creativity of new and emerging BIPOC artists in Scarborough by providing them with the resources, connections, and opportunities necessary to thrive. We intend to create new spaces where all are welcomed and celebrated.
THE TEAM
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Daisy Nolasco (or just dais) is a second-generation Ilokano creator, community worker, and mental health advocate. She’s also one of the co-founders of kin + care collective! You may also know her from Scarborough Health Network Foundation’s Love, Scarborough campaign and her past work with the Toronto Ward Museum and Bayanihan Empowerment. dais often wonders about the ways that identity, mental health, and creativity shape diasporic realities in Scarborough. Community-rooted with a background in social work, peer support, and community research, she is passionate about cultivating new spaces for her community to connect, create, and learn together. Her art draws from ancestral rememberings, faraway dreamscapes, and parallel realities and, lately, has explored themes such as softness, hope, community, displacement, and her journey navigating mental health/illness. You can learn more about her art at bio.site/dais or @daaisybelle.
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Thevya (she/her) is an Eelam Tamil community worker and facilitator. Arriving and settling in Scarborough with her family in the mid-90s, she recognizes the importance of storytelling in the preservation of oral histories, cultures, and memory. She has engaged in advocacy and knowledge-mobilization work on the Tamil Struggle, coordinated the documentation of migration histories, and organized civic engagement initiatives in Toronto. Thevya passionately combines her education with her commitment to decolonization and community care. Her work is rooted in exploring a range of themes including displacement, identity, and survival in diasporic and racialized communities.
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sun ravichandran is a queer trans disabled tamil artist, 1.5 generation immigrant, and interdimensional witch from the coast of kanyakumari based in scarborough. they primarily paint, draw, and sculpt to translate their inner worlds through visual media, using watercolours, gouache, acrylics, and ceramic clay. sneha is currently exploring reusing found materials such as textiles, plastics, cardboard, and glass to create art in a more sustainable way. she is an earth worker, a farmer, a community facilitator, a herbalist in training, a lover of animals, especially birds. they are a conduit, transmuting messages and energy from their spirit guides, ancestors, and the collective consciousness through rituals of grief, hope, and love. their artistic practice is a form of documentation of their inner and outer worlds, the intersections of their identities, and duties to the land and spirits. if you would like to view their offerings, you can do so at www.lilsun.art or on instagram @lilsun.draws
the Land
We honour and give thanks to the sacred land that we live, work, create, and play on. The area known as Tkaronto is the traditional and ancestral territory of many Nations including the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. We acknowledge these Nations and any other Nations who care for the land - recorded and unrecorded - as the past, present, and future caretakers of this land. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous Peoples from across Turtle Island, or what is colonially known as North America. We are grateful to have the opportunity to live, work, and connect on this land and we honour the responsibility we hold within it under the Dish with One Spoon Covenant: to share and care for the land.
As first and second generation Canadians, we recognize the dark and colonial past - and present - of so-called Canada. We are settlers on these lands and we are all responsible for uprooting and dismantling the colonial white supremacist forces that continue to oppress Indigenous Peoples today. As we share and reflect on our individual and collective stories of kinship, care, and connection, let us also remember and honour the stories of these lands and all Indigenous Peoples from across Turtle Island and across the globe, whose stories continue to be forcefully stolen, silenced, and rewritten without their consent.
As kin + care, and alongside our community, we seek to uphold the Dish with One Spoon. We strive to uncover and celebrate the stories of Scarborough in an anti-colonial, anti-oppressive, anti-racist, trauma-informed way. Throughout our work, present and future, we have centred our intentions around this land's covenant of only taking what we need, sharing space with others, and caring for the land that we are privileged to call 'home'.
We invite you to join us in honouring the land we stand on as well as all of the rich stories that grow from it.
