Orange Shirt Day 2023
Youth Empowerment on Orange Shirt Day: Hull Services’ Creative Initiative
This year, for National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, which is also Orange Shirt Day, Hull Services developed an initiative to get the young people we support more involved with honouring this important day together as an Agency. We developed an Orange Shirt Day design contest for them to participate in!
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day acknowledge that residential schools are a part of Canada’s history, and wearing an orange shirt is honouring the residential school survivors while also showing collective commitment to ensure that Every Child Matters. Hull BELIEVES Every Child Matters; therefore, it was important for us to have a design created by the artistic talents of the young people we support. We invited them to submit their artwork through the design contest where the winner’s piece would be featured on this year’s shirt. Each young person who submitted a design was part of selecting the final design through a group-guided session with Hull’s Indigenous Resources Coordinator, Casey Eagle Speaker. Through that guided session, a collective decision was made that all the designs would be featured on this year’s shirt! We are thrilled to share the final design!
We would also like to give a huge thank you to Shepherd Originals for their support with this initiative and bringing together each design into the final design!
About Orange Shirt Day
Both National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day take place on September 30.
September 30 falls around the time Indigenous children were taken away to residential schools – and the choice of orange for the shirt stems from Phyllis Webstad’s personal experience in residential schools. You can read more about Webstad’s story here.
Orange Shirt Day is an Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day intended to raise awareness of the individual, family and community inter-generational impacts of residential schools, and to promote the concept of “Every Child Matters”. The orange shirt is a symbol of the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations.
All Canadians are encouraged to wear orange shirts to honour the thousands of Survivors of residential schools.