Anne Bishop is a Canadian lesbian activist, educator, grassroots organizer and LGBT rights advocate.

Biography

Anne Charlotte Bishop is an activist, author, educator, food security advocate, labour organizer, and community development worker. Bishop has worked over thirty years in the field of international development and engaged in social justice movements. She also worked for the Nova Scotia Public Service in the area of diversity and employment equity as well as food security issues within Canada. She briefly attended the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

's Centre for Christian Studies in the 1970s with the intent to join the

United Church of Canada The United Church of Canada (UCC; ) is a mainline Protestant denomination that is the largest Protestant Christian denomination in Canada and the second largest Canadian Christian denomination after the Catholic Church in Canada. The United Chu ...

as a

Deaconess The ministry of a deaconess is a ministry for women in some Protestant, Oriental Orthodox, and Eastern Orthodox churches to provide pastoral care, especially for other women, and which may carry a liturgical role. The word comes from the Greek ...

. Her studies introduced her to social analysis and collective approaches to education. Bishop was later one of the commissioners (along with Pat Kearns and Lucien Royer) who worked on the People's Food Commission, which was a participatory research project that held hearings across Canada in 1979 on issues of food security. In the 1980s she helped organize a union of workers (predominantly women) at a local fish plant in Pictou County where she worked. In the summer of 1987, she joined Henson College at

Dalhousie University Dalhousie University (commonly known as Dal) is a large public research university in Nova Scotia, Canada, with three campuses in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Halifax, a fourth in Bible Hill, Nova Scotia, Bible Hill, and a second medical school campus ...

as the coordinator of the Community Development and Outreach Unit. As an adult educator, she helped develop a course on grassroots leadership development and wrote two influential books on consciousness-raising, anti-oppression organizational change and allyship. She has cited the

Diggers The Diggers were a group of religious and political dissidents in England, associated with a political ideology and programme resembling what would later be called agrarian socialism.; ; ; Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard (Digger), Will ...

movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England as a source of influence. She was actively involved in social issues related to LGBT rights, union organizing,

food system The term food system describes the interconnected systems and processes that influence nutrition, food, health, community development, and agriculture. A food system includes all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population: growi ...

advocacy, equity and anti-racist efforts in the province of

Nova Scotia Nova Scotia is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada, located on its east coast. It is one of the three Maritime Canada, Maritime provinces and Population of Canada by province and territory, most populous province in Atlan ...

since the mid-1980s. Bishop continues her work leading workshops on structural oppression.

LGBT rights activism

Bishop advocated on behalf of the rights of lesbian and gay men in Halifax, Nova Scotia, leading to the securing of spousal rights for CUSO (Canadian University Service Overseas) and

employees. From 1987 to 1992 she played a central role in Lesbian and Gay Rights Nova Scotia, which lobbied the provincial government for inclusion of sexual orientation in the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act. In a landmark decision, it was the first provincial jurisdiction in Canada to do so in 1992.

Personal life

In the 1980s, Bishop, along with Brenda Beagan, founded a women's chorus, The Secret Furies. Bishop had previously been part of a quartet called Lysistrata. Bishop is currently an organic farmer in rural Nova Scotia with her partner Jan. In 1998, her portrait was painted for The ArQuives.

Select publications

* (a novel) * * * * Bishop, Anne. "On the March: Maritime Gays and Lesbians Get Organized." New Maritimes, 8:3 (January–February 1990): 1–17. *

Awards and recognition

* Bishop's portrait by Mary S. Lyons was one of the 25 inaugural portraits that established the

National Portrait Gallery National Portrait Gallery may refer to: * National Portrait Gallery (Australia), in Canberra * National Portrait Gallery (Sweden), in Mariefred *National Portrait Gallery (United States), in Washington, D.C. *National Portrait Gallery, London ...

of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bishop, Anne Canadian women activists Canadian LGBTQ rights activists 1950 births Place of birth missing (living people) Date of birth missing (living people) Living people Canadian women civil rights activists 21st-century Canadian novelists 20th-century Canadian non-fiction writers 20th-century Canadian women writers 21st-century Canadian non-fiction writers 21st-century Canadian women writers Canadian women novelists Canadian women non-fiction writers Canadian lesbian writers 21st-century Canadian LGBTQ people