There is a moment after every act of violence at a public gathering when something invisible happens.
People stop coming.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. But quietly — a text that says "I don't think I'm going this year." A parent who decides the risk isn't worth it. A young person who wanted to go but stays home because something in their gut says no.
And nobody talks about that part.
We talk about the violence. We talk about the victims. We talk about security, and policing, and policy. But we rarely talk about what happens to the community after the tape comes down and the news trucks leave.
What happens is this: the gathering stops feeling safe.
And when gathering stops feeling safe, something fundamental breaks.
I've been running DÉSIFEST for twenty years. Two decades of building a space where South Asian culture could be celebrated openly, loudly, and without apology in the middle of this city. What I've learned in that time is that festivals aren't just entertainment. They are medicine.
They are the place where a first-generation kid from Scarborough sees themselves reflected on a stage for the first time. Where an auntie who has spent forty years feeling invisible in this country feels, for one weekend, completely seen. Where a community that has often been told to assimilate finds permission to be fully, unapologetically itself.
That is not a small thing. That is a mental health intervention at scale.
And now I have to sit with the reality that events like what happened at Salsa on St. Clair don't just injure the people present. They injure the very idea of public gathering.
They make hosts afraid to host.
They make attendees afraid to attend.
They make funders nervous. They make sponsors hesitant. They make city partners add liability clauses to contracts and security requirements to permits that smaller community organizations simply cannot afford to meet.
The burden lands hardest on the communities that need these gatherings most.
When a South Asian festival gets cancelled because the cost of security has become prohibitive — that is a mental health crisis. When a Caribbean Carnival has to scale back because insurance rates have tripled — that is a mental health crisis. When a Black arts event shuts down because the organizers are afraid of what might happen and what they'll be blamed for if it does — that is a mental health crisis.
We just don't call it that.
Here is the cycle nobody is talking about:
Violence at a public event → fear of gathering → events cancelled or scaled back → communities lose their spaces for connection → isolation increases → mental health deteriorates → the conditions that produce violence in the first place get worse.
We are solving for the wrong end of the equation.
If we want safer public spaces, we have to invest in the conditions that make communities resilient — and that means protecting the gathering itself. It means funding community organizations that host events, not just policing them. It means treating cultural festivals as infrastructure, not entertainment. It means understanding that when a community loses its gathering space, it loses something that no amount of therapy or awareness campaigns can replace.
At DÉSIFEST, we have never taken for granted that people will show up.
Every year we earn it. We earn the trust of our community by showing up for them consistently, by centering their safety and their experience, and by building something they believe in.
But I won't pretend the conversations haven't changed in recent years. The questions we get from sponsors about security. The city requirements that keep growing. The quiet conversations with my team about what we do if something goes wrong.
That weight is real. And every organizer running a community event in this city is carrying it.
The answer is not to stop gathering. The answer is to understand that protecting gathering is an act of public health.
Support your local cultural festivals. Show up. Bring your family. And demand from your elected officials not just a response to violence — but a sustained investment in the community infrastructure that prevents it.
At DÉSIFEST we will keep showing up. Twenty years in, we know what's at stake if we don't.
And at Schoolio, we believe the work starts even earlier — in classrooms and home learning environments, where Social Emotional Learning gives young people the tools to understand themselves and connect with others before the isolation ever takes root.
The drum does not stop. But we have to fight for the right to play it.