London ACORN Building Power at Citywide All Chapters Meeting!
Posted January 29, 2025
On Tuesday, nearly forty London ACORN members came together for a fantastic City-Wide All Chapters Meeting to engage with low income tenants across London and discuss priority issues to work on in 2025.
At the meeting, ACORN leaders reviewed our campaign progress from 2025, including big victories like winning the second anti-renoviction bylaw in Ontario, and ongoing work members have been doing like building strong tenant unions in various buildings across the city (shoutout to our newest tenant union at 85 Walnut Street who have been growing CRAZY fast!). Leaders also reviewed major updates on ACORN’s Rent Control, NSF fees, and Michael Klein campaigns, along with a brief review of London ACORN’s Tenant Protection Platform.
Following the campaign updates, ACORN members divided into small groups to discuss issues they’re facing in their communities and what they’d like to see changed in 2025. Groups reported back on a wide variety of issues like AGIs, loss of affordable housing, and renovictions, but overwhelmingly the issues members most discussed were concerns related to disrepair, mismanagement, lack of pest control and other problems caused by landlords not being held accountable to do their jobs!!
Following group discussions, ACORN members held a vote on their top three priority issues they’d like to work on this year, and the priorities members decided on were:
- Unaccountable landlords and the city not holding landlords accountable
- Low social assistance (ODSP, OW, CPP, OAS, etc) rates and benefits
- Systemic issues with London/City Owned Housing (LMHC)
ACORN members reaffirmed the need to continue to push for our ongoing campaigns along with these priorities, and finished the meeting with a call for everyone to continue working together, building power, and fighting for our rights!
Huge shoutout to ACORN leaders Claire Wittnebel, Jordan Smith, Farrah Sherrard, and Felix Krasnov for doing an awesome job leading the meeting!