Julie B, is a co-founder, coordinator and Board Chair of SafeSpace London. Safespace is a drop in centre and community for, by and with sex workers and accomplices. She has been a community activist for over 20 years. In 2001 she co-founded ‘Unity Project – For Relief of Homelessness in London, Ontario’ with fellow youth activists and homeless individuals creating a tent city in a downtown park that led to the initiation of the Unity Project – a shelter service with a peer-supported community model. Since 2015, Julie has been a peer researcher in community-based projects, most recently an exploration of sex workers’ use of digital technology. She has been instrumental in activities across the province related to raising awareness about the harmful impacts of policing, criminalization and stigma in the lives of sex workers.
Dr. Jodi Hall has been a volunteer and researcher with SafeSpace London since 2014, and is a full-time professor in Doula Studies and the Western- Fanshawe Collaborative BScN Nursing Program at Fanshawe. Her activism has centred around reproductive justice, trauma, social exclusion, sex work, ethics and criminality. She has been as a frontline counselor with survivors of trauma and violence for more than two decades, and brings the knowledge shared with her from community into her academic work aimed at dismantling systems of oppression. Through her professional work, Jodi has contributed to numerous research studies and publications on health inequities among criminalized women, trauma and the transition to parenting, and a housing first approach for women, using approaches that actively engage community members as indispensable partners. She sees her activism as an inextricably linked to academic work.