Safety Squad

Buddy UpTO founders Mita Hans and Kanwar Anit Singh Saini are using social media to make Toronto more secure—for everyone.

- Vibhu Gairola

IN NOVEMBER 2015, soon after a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris, a woman in a hijab was assaulted and robbed by two men outside an elementary school in a north Toronto neighbourhood in Canada. The hate crime shocked many, but its vicious nature was familiar to speech-language pathologist and artist Kanwar Anit Singh Saini, 35, who says, “I’ve faced my fair share of violence as a gay man in a turban.”

The next day, he posted a message on his Facebook page offering to run errands with people who’d felt the bull’s eye on their back grow overnight: “If anyone needs a buddy … hijabi, turbaned or otherwise.”

Within moments of reading Saini’s status, his friend Mita Hans, a 50-year-old social services worker, got a call from her sister in Mississauga, Ontario, who would be accompanying their turbaned father to the bank because the family worried for his safety. Hans wondered how many others were feeling similarly vulnerable.