These women have been voices for equity. Now they're being honoured as 'changemakers'

Kayla Grey, Kathleen Newman-Bremang and Amanda Parris say being named winners of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's inaugural Changemaker Award is "a daunting honour" but also "a hopeful sign" of change to come.

The award, which will be presented at Sunday night's Canadian Screen Awards, recognizes those bringing attention to systemic racism and promoting equity and inclusion in Canadian media.

"For the Canadian Screen Awards to give us this honour, I think they are also committing to more work," said the Toronto-based Newman-Bremang, deputy director of Unbothered, Refinery29's online community for Black women.

"You can't put the three of us on something and say that you respect our work if you're not also willing to continue this conversation."

For this trio, that conversation has often been about how to create more space for fellow Black journalists and how to amplify stories that are not being heard.

A 2021 diversity survey by the Canadian Association of Journalists found 75 per cent of nearly 3,900 respondents were white compared to just 10 per cent who were Asian, six per cent who were Indigenous and three per cent who were Black.

"I'm part of a continuum of people that have been consistently attempting to push this industry into spaces that it keeps on saying it doesn't want to go," said the Toronto-based Parris, a CBC host, playwright and screenwriter.

"I am only able to do this work because of the work of the people that came before me, and I'm doing it for the people that are coming after me."

But, she added, it's hard to say if significant change has come, "because the doors that have been opened and the spaces that have been made have not been structural, meaning they can be closed up again."

"Until there is structural change, then I don't know that the idea of a changemaker makes the most sense," she said.

"I think we trigger conversations, we infiltrate, we subvert. But I don't know that it's on us; we don't have that kind of power."

For Toronto-based Grey, the first Black woman to host a flagship sports show in the country with TSN's The Shift, the label of "changemaker" is a tough one because she considers working to help her own simply who she is — not something "radical."

"I get introduced as 'the first' and I don't want to be that anymore," she said.

"I want to be like, 'Yes, and look who's come behind me and who is beside me.' This industry doesn't ensure that people that look like me are not the last, and it's lonely.