Atkinson’s Board Chair Wendy Chan and CEO Colette Murphy presented the 2025 Good Fight Prize to the Worth More! Campaign for Child Care Workers on Wednesday, November 26, 2025 at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Temerty Theatre. What follows are their speaking notes.

WC: Good evening. My name is Wendy Chan. I’m the Chair of the Atkinson Foundation Board of Directors. It’s my honour to welcome you to this celebration of the 2025 Good Fight Prize. 

We are gathering tonight on the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation as well as the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee peoples. We acknowledge the displacement and exploitation of Indigenous peoples and lands through colonization. By recognizing Indigenous jurisdiction and leadership, and seeking to repair relationships, we’re living into our commitment to social and economic justice every day.

This beautiful space — Temertry Theatre at the Royal Conservatory of Music — is one of the performance halls where musicians like pianist LaLa Lee hone their craft. LaLa is a graduate and an administrator at the Glenn Gould School. Please join me in expressing appreciation for the music we’ve heard this evening. 

CM: I’m Colette Murphy, Atkinson’s Chief Executive Officer. Wendy and I lead a small but mighty team of “good fighters”.

Put up your hand if you are an Atkinson Board or staff member or one of the people enlisted to help organize this event, and please keep your hand up.

Now let’s see who else is here.

If you’re directly connected to one of the three campaigns that are finalists for the Good Fight Prize, please put up your hand and keep it up.

If you’re directly connected to a former winner, either the Fight for 15 and Fairness or the Campaign for Community Benefits, please raise your hand.

If you’re connected to an organization that is fighting for decent work in all its dimensions, raise your hand and keep it up.

If you’re connected to another good fight – for the planet, food security, affordable housing or any others, raise your hand.

And finally if you’re here because you are a friend, a philanthropist or policy advocate, a member of the media or creative profession,  an elected representative or public official here to show your support for the cause of decent work, please put your hand up.

And now that we can actually see each other and how we’re connected, we can put our hands down. 

Relationships like ours, multiplied many times over, are the foundation of a movement capable of a good fight — a fight for a better world.

I can’t thank you enough for coming this evening.  The one night of the year we shine a light on the campaigns for decent work that give us a good reason to stop doomscrolling. The one night we get to thank the people who usually thank all of us for showing up.  And the one night we take stock of how far we’ve come without worrying about how much farther we have to go.

For Atkinson, this night is also the high point in a new public education and engagement campaign that began in October and concludes next week. The banners to my right display the images from two of the eight full-page ads created for the Saturday Star and modified for digital and social media.

We owe a debt of gratitude to our friends at the Toronto Star for introducing the Good Fight Prize to such a broad audience. And to Target, the brilliant Newfoundland agency that conceived the ad campaign — represented here tonight by its founder and chief storyteller Noel O’Dea and Natalie Lemire.

What began in 2017 as a quiet gesture of appreciation every five years has been reborn as an annual, juried award and a year-round ad campaign with the potential to reach and influence a significant audience. 

It’s said that change is possible when at least 3.5 per cent of the population is engaged in an issue or cause. We can’t remember another time when this kind of engagement has been harder. Or a time when people who live on low incomes have had to fight so hard to be seen, heard and respected. That’s why Atkinson is upping our contribution to the movement for decent work in some familiar and new ways.

You can count on us to continue backing movement builders who make public education, engagement and leadership development possible. And we’ll continue to use our power as an advocate and investor to amplify their positions. We’ll bring more resources into the ring where many good fights intersect — for working people, the planet, and future generations. You’ll find us where working people build reciprocal relationships with policy thinkers and decision makers within our democracy.

And once a year, we’ll be here — with all of you and with new friends — egging and encouraging each other on. Taking deep satisfaction from our shared work and real inspiration from each other. That’s our hope and that’s our open invitation to you.

WC: On a much smaller scale, the Good Fight Prize Jury experienced what Colette just described when we met earlier this month. I want to thank my fellow jurors — Kumsa Baker, Fay Faraday, Kofi Hope, Mark Surman, and Colette — for the care and clarity they brought to the selection process.

This year, we were asked to consider a remarkable field of campaigns. The range was striking. Different issues, different strategies, different parts of the movement but all connected by a shared vision of decent work for all.

We read about campaigns led by workers, by community organizers, by coalitions and networks, and by young people stepping into leading roles.

Some were on the ground where people live and work and others were engaged in what’s known as the “air game” of changing public narratives. Some were advocating for policy and legal reforms within the legislative process — and many were doing all of these things all at once.

Taken together, the nominations reminded us that there is no single playbook for a good fight. Many voices and strategies deliver the wins, and turn the losses and draws into progress.

Choosing three finalists was tough, so I’m proud to introduce them to you — in alphabetical order:

Our first finalist, the Investors for a Fair Economy campaign, works in a part of the economy that can seem removed from the day-to-day fight for decent work: the world of shareholders and capital markets.

This campaign organizes investors to use their power to support workers’ rights. It has brought together 47 Ontario institutional investors — and many more in Canada and around the world — to push companies on core issues like the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, racial inequity, and forced and child labour in supply chains.

Companies like Starbucks, Loblaws, McDonald’s, and Mondelēz received calls from their shareholders for independent assessments of labour practices, safer workplaces, and stronger human rights protections.

They have also supported federal legislation aimed at ending forced labour in Canadian supply chains, and helped launch international investor networks representing trillions of dollars to stand behind workers’ rights.

Please join me in a round of applause for the Investors for a Fair Economy Campaign.

Our second finalist is The Worth More! Campaign for Child Care Workers. This campaign brings together early childhood educators, child care workers, unions, families, and their allies to push for fair wages and decent work in Ontario’s $10-a-day child care system — a system we cannot sustain without a strong and respected workforce. When Ontario joined the federal plan, families finally saw fees start to come down. But the people who provide care received far less attention.

The province set a wage floor of $18 an hour for Registered Early Childhood Educators — a segment of the workforce made up overwhelmingly by women and racialized workers.

In response, the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario, and CUPE Ontario launched the Worth More! Campaign with a clear message: Care work is the work that makes all other work possible.

They organized Worth More Wednesdays, invited MPPs into child care centres, held rallies at Queen’s Park, mobilized parents and providers, and made sure these issues stayed in front of decision-makers and in the media.

Their persistence paid off. Two years ago, the province announced a mid-agreement wage increase, raising the floor from $18 to $23.86 an hour, with annual increases.

Ontario still does not have a wage grid. It does not have guaranteed benefits and pensions across the sector. So, this campaign is far from over.

Please join me in thanking the people behind The Worth More! Campaign.

Our third finalist is the Youth Climate Corps — a campaign led by young people who are refusing to inherit a crisis without the tools to solve it. The Climate Emergency Unit, Climate Action Network, and the Small Change Fund are behind this campaign.

The Youth Climate Corps is based on the idea that if we’re going to deal with the climate emergency, then we’ll need thousands of people doing the work — and those should be good, unionized, living wage jobs.

 Across the country, young organizers are pointing out a clear contradiction: Canada needs a massive workforce for the climate transition, and yet youth unemployment is the highest it’s been in years.

The Youth Climate Corps set its sights on a federal public jobs program that hires young people to do the urgent and necessary work — from ecosystem restoration and renewable energy, to building retrofits and extreme weather response, and to performing care roles supporting elders, children, and neighbours.

In a short time, this campaign has built a coalition across sectors and movements, and they’re already influencing public policy: a House of Commons motion, federal consultations and more than 100 meetings with MPs and staff, and most recently, a significant win: a two-year pilot included in Budget 2025 — a major step toward a permanent national program.

Let’s take a moment to show some love for the Youth Climate Corps campaign!

In a moment of great instability and inequality, our three finalists give us tangible reasons to believe that change is possible and the good fight is winnable.

In that spirit, the jury made its decision to award our $50,000 Prize to a campaign that stood out for its perseverance, creativity and breadth of organizing. The two other finalists will receive $15,000 each.

The winner of the 2025 Good Fight Prize is:

The Worth More! Campaign represented  by Carolyn Ferns from the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, Amber Straker from the Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario, and their CUPE Ontario collaborators.

Please join me in welcoming Carolyn, Amber and their crew to the stage.

CM: Tonight, we honour one winner — but we also honour the movement builders who got us here and who will take us forward. Those who have always believed that “justice is what love looks like in public”. And that “power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice”. They show us what these beliefs look like in action every day. If there is a thread through all of this work, it is this.

Those of us who fight for decent work choose to fight for each other. To demonstrate care and concern across sectors, geography and differences. And we choose what Wendy’s great, great grandfather Joseph Atkinson called “humanity above all” when we insist everyone deserves and can have decent work.

So, let’s choose to stay close to these campaigns. Share and respond to their calls to action. Support their organizing. Tell their stories. Use whatever power we possess to help them win.

We’re all in this together for as long as it takes. Tomorrow we’ll be back in the ring but tonight please stay for a drink, some food and more conversation. Let’s keep the celebration going.

Photo credit: Jenna Marie Wakani