Making Youth Voices Matter

Rayne Fisher-Quann
Executive Director, March for Our Education
@rayneydaes

Hi! My name is Rayne Fisher-Quann and I’m the founder and executive director of March for Our Education. We’re an advocacy group dedicated to fighting for the rights of young people and marginalized groups in Ontario who stand to suffer as a result of education cuts and curriculum changes. We believe that education is, full stop, the most important contributor to the safety, health, and progress of our population, and we view it as a human right that education be modern, equal-minded, and up to date.

We started in the summer of 2018, right after Doug Ford announced his changes to the sexual education curriculum and the Indigenous curriculum. We quickly put together a rally that drew over 2000 people to Queen’s Park to stand for sex ed and Indigenous education. When we didn’t see a response, we decided that young people needed to have their voice heard: so we started organizing a walkout with a few other groups. The movement blew up, and in just three weeks, our walkout became the largest organized high school protest in Canada’s history.

We believe in the power of young people and we believe in their right to be heard. There is nothing more important than making youth feel like their voices matter: after all, we’re the future of this province and it almost seems ridiculous that we don’t have a say in what comes next. We are a movement built on young women, and while that meant that getting the respect we deserve was a little harder, we think that there is no more powerful force on earth than that of smart, motivated, educated teenage girls. We’re going to change the world.