Stopping injustice a life goal for young Lindsay woman
All her life she’s considered herself an advocate for those who have been wronged, but last year in June was when Brooklyn Korz’s first involvement on the front lines took place, at Lindsay’s Black Lives Matter rally, where more than 200 people walked, shouted and kneeled — and which she had a part in organizing.
Brooklyn didn’t speak at the rally, but “Peyton (Caldoza, a young woman of colour who did address the group) was my friend, and when the worldwide protests began, we didn’t know if something like that would happen locally because our town is considered pretty small, and we hadn’t really seen something on such a large scale before in Lindsay and Kawartha Lakes.”
She told the Advocate she and Peyton came up with ideas for social media sharing and began organizing when they found out Selina Reevie and Abby Jardine were doing something similar the same weekend. The four of them created the Black Lives Matter of Lindsay Facebook page, with Selina and Abby organizing discussions with the police to shut the street down for the march.
Brooklyn says during the BLM protests, “it sort of solidified that I want to go into policing because I want to make the (social justice) changes we all talked about.”
She would then go into the police foundations program at Georgian College in Barrie. “I’ve wanted to go into policing for as long as I can remember,” she explained, “but the specifics of the unit I want to work on didn’t come up until I started seeing people from those units in various presentations through college.”
Having graduated in April 2021, she works at Tony’s Best Pizza & Wings, where she’s worked part-time for several years, and is considering a job in security. After getting further experience, she then hopes to work in crisis intervention or a unit that deals with child exploitation.
Her own road to being open as a gay woman has been bumpy. “I can remember thinking I was different in middle school but I never fully realized and came out to myself when I was 16.” Now out and proud, she decided against coming out during high school because she heard terms like “gay” being used towards other people as an insult. I know what that’s like. Not until I was 14 did I know the word was definitively not an insult. Now I’m proud to be in the definition of the word too.”
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. “ I wear a lot of clothes some people might consider to be only for boys, so I’ve definitely experienced some looks of disgust, some snide comments from strangers, but I’ve never truly experienced bullying from it. People didn’t come to me outright and say ‘We’re not friends anymore,’ but after coming out I definitely lost contact with people. But it was never really a loss to me. If they weren’t going to support who I was, it was fine.”
She enjoys taking trips through town and Ken Reid Conservation Area, either walking or riding on her longboard. She also likes watching horror movies and documentaries, and playing video games on the side. She lives with her mother Rochelle, father Jim, and little sister Emma, and is coming up on two years with her girlfriend Kayla.