Notebook
Neal Rockwell is an artist, journalist and media activist based in Montreal. He is collaborating with the Herongate Tenants Coalition to create multimedia documentation of the lives and living conditions of Herongate residents. He is also working on a skillshare with tenants to help develop media and documentary skills. Notebook is his ongoing feature, which includes a mixture of written observations and interviews, photographs and short video clips. 
I met up with Mumina Egal and Josh Hawley at the Shaw Centre in Downtown Ottawa. They are community organizers currently working to organize residents in a complex of buildings in the neighbourhood known as Herongate. Tenants are facing eviction from their corporate landlord, Timbercreek Asset Management, as the units where they presently reside are slated for demolition to make way for luxury apartments. Read More…
The Story of Herongate
Mavis Finnamore, Chair of the South Ottawa ACORN Chapter until 2016, was a long term resident (over 25 years) of Herongate in Ottawa. Married, with a degree in Anthropology, she has two children. Her interest in people almost led her to a career in social work, but she didn’t think she could handle some of the heartbreaking cases of abuse, so she quit. Her interest in people and social causes didn’t stop however; it just grew in different ways. In the meantime, she worked in Statistics Canada for over 10 years, and later, other retail jobs.
I moved into my Herongate townhouse with my husband in late 1983. It had been built by Minto in the 1960s and was still in great shape. We were actually only the second tenants there, as my best friend grew up there and we found out her mother wanted to move out. Read More…