About Filipinas of HamOnt

Our story

Filipinas of HamOnt is a by-for-and-with grassroots collective, started in June 2020, that responds to the lack of spaces dedicated to Filipina/xs, in what is presently known as Hamilton and even across Canada. Guided by antiracist and decolonial feminist values, we aspire to claim our individual and collective power through collaborative, creative and liberatory practices and spaces of doing to contribute to movement building for Filipinas and racialized women and nonbinary folks in the creation of transformative change in communities.

We work with individuals, community organizations, supporters and partners in Hamilton and beyond. We create and highlight transformative narratives, engage in community organizing and alliance-building, and develop dynamic programming as the opportunity and need to arise. 

  • Mission

    Established in June 2020, three months after the first COVID 19 lockdown in Ontario, the Filipinas of HamOnt is a community-engaged initiative by Filipinas for Filipinas, committed to supporting women, girls and femme-identified Hamiltonians of Philippine-ancestry in transforming their private struggles and joys as racialized immigrant settlers in Canada into community solidarity and celebration.

  • Vision

    For Filipina Hamiltonians from all walks of life, alongside low-income communities of Indigenous, Black, people of colour, newcomers, women and the gender-diverse, to be involved in reshaping public local and global discourses and narratives, to be leaders in institutional decision-making across Hamilton and beyond, to enjoy with all the people of Hamilton a just, inclusive and equitable economy.

  • Goals

    When we bring our private joys and struggles to the realm of community solidarities and celebrations, we can learn and draw upon, create or recreate,  expand or contract, subvert, accept or modify from each of our individual lived experiences. We are no longer limited by our own ‘realities’ but begin to understand that bigger social forces shape our lived experiences. 

The Filipinas of HamOnt started in June 2020 as an offshoot of the Reaching for Power Workshop Series, which the COVID-19 closure pushed to realign funding towards participant projects.

We, Anabelle and Jessica, were participants in that Workshop Series.

Both Hamiltonians of Philippine-ancestry, we worked together and gave birth to the Filipinas of HamOnt project. Our intention for the project is four-fold :

(1) To search for Filipina-Hamiltonians from all walks of life and map the spaces we inhabit through an online survey;

(2) to document the diversities and the similarities in our lived experiences as immigrant settlers in HamOnt;

(3) to centre Filipina-Hamiltonians’ voices and faces, through the Conversations with the Filipinas of HamOnt series; and

(4) to understand the needs of Philippine women in our city, from an organizing perspective. When we conceptualized the Filipinas of HamOnt, we did not know what will happen next to the project. Or that Phase 2 is on the horizon.