about 3ESM
Who We Are
3rd Eye Street Media is a lived-experience creative collective telling the stories most systems erase. We blend journalism, art, and advocacy to document real life on the margins without filters or euphemisms.
What We Do
We publish zines, essays, audio, visual media, and street-level reports. We run workshops, develop campaigns, and offer consulting informed by firsthand experience with poverty, addiction, housing insecurity, and frontline systems.
Why We Do It
Because people who’ve lived through the hardest parts of this city deserve to be heard — and because those who haven’t need to understand the realities behind the headlines. Our work bridges that divide with honesty and compassion.
About Our Founder
Founded by Sarah O’Connell-Austin, a writer and advocate whose life experience fuels every project. Sarah built 3ESM as a platform for truth-telling and change, grounded in survival, creativity, and community
Our goal is simple but radical: to break the divide between the street and the boardroom, between those who live it and those who legislate it. We challenge stereotypes, we confront stigma, and we amplify voices that can’t be ignored.
Our founder
Sarah O’Connell-Austin is an artist, writer, veterinary technician, activist, and mother based in Ottawa. Since 2020, she has faced chronic housing instability and homelessness, experiences that shape her advocacy and fuel 3rd Eye Street Media, a platform amplifying ground-level perspectives on poverty, housing, and resilience. Carrying forward the legacy of her grandmother, Dorothy O’Connell — Ottawa’s “poet laureate of the poor” and a trailblazing anti-poverty activist — Sarah uses art, media, and lived experience to challenge stigma, inspire compassion, and push for systemic change.
Who “we” represent
We are the ones who fall through the cracks.
Denied services because we “don’t look homeless enough.”
Barred from stores because we “look too homeless.”
Forgotten on the street because we’re “too hard to reach.”
We are made to feel like lesser parents, lesser children, lesser people—
as if poverty, addiction, and instability were choices.
Loss after loss, with no time to recover.
Shamed for struggles we didn’t create, blamed for a crisis built on systemic failure.
We are victims of chance, of circumstance, of housing shortages and discrimination.
A society within your society, but pushed outside of it.
We are the ones who sit on the ground.
The broke, the hungry, the grieving.
The addicted, the mentally ill, the “degenerates.”
The chronically unstably housed, unloved, and medicated people of Ottawa.
Every face on these streets has survived more than anyone should.
Every injustice fuels the fire that will not go out.
In every story—hardship, loss, resilience—I find inspiration.
We are stripped of the tools we need to survive.
You see the wear etched on our faces, but not the silent battles:
mental health, addiction, separation, the daily fight to hold on.
We are the ones sitting street-side, silently fighting against poor mental health, addiction, survival, separation from family, loss of safety, loss of comfort, loss of hope.
Still, while treated with disdain, we smile as you pass.
Do you smile back?
We are the chronically unstably housed and homeless individuals of Ottawa.
Let's Connect