Toronto Ward Museum Giving Season 2022

The Toronto Ward Museum serves as a model of what a museum of Toronto can be: reimagining how to excavate the story of a city where an unprecedented concentration of cultures intersect and interact with one another. 

This year we have brought unique community-centered programming to neighbourhoods that for too long were deemed unworthy of meaningful recognition, in the form of multilingual park-based workshops, human library events with seniors, site-specific showcases, and walking tours led by local residents.

Our local Block Parties in 2022 paved the way for our remarkable city-wide Block by Block Exhibition at the Toronto Reference Library which captured the insights of over 100 storytellers across 4 neighbourhoods, carefully researched and curated by 45 racialized youth artists hired and trained by TWM. Our exhibition revealed how stories of displacement, migration, arrival, and survival can and should guide future city-building. How the textures of daily life, whether it is the warm wind at night time or sharing beef patties after school, are embedded in our understanding of place and cultural heritage – and are worth preserving.

The truth is, there is no other organization doing cultural heritage work with the care, research, and ethical framework of the Toronto Ward Museum. We believe in engaging migrant communities as authors of their stories and advocates for their futures rather than subjects of studies and reports. Our programming celebrates how these communities have persisted through informal networks, grassroots activism, and local organizing that reaches across cultural and linguistic lines. A city as diverse and expanding as Toronto deserves a cultural heritage organization like the Toronto Ward Museum.

Please donate to support the Toronto Ward Museum today and share this appeal with at least 5 contacts to whom this work represents a powerful shift in how Toronto recognizes, represents, and redresses the experiences of marginalized communities. 

In 2023, the Toronto Ward Museum plans to:

• Expand our heritage and arts-based programming to other neighbourhoods facing rapid redevelopment.
• Revamp our digital game-based program, Not Just Numbers, that encourages people to uncover the life stories of Canadian immigrants and Indigenous peoples recorded within the 1871–1921 census, paralleled with insights from newly available 2021 census data.
• Develop educational workshops on the lived experiences of racism and housing discrimination using Block by Block’s previous research and exhibition materials.
• Develop a community archive for our oral history recordings.
• Sustain full-time positions for Marketing Coordinator and Fundraising Coordinator

Unlike many other heritage organizations, the Toronto Ward Museum does not have a pool of private donors or access to elite networks to support our operational funding – we depend on the support of people like you to sustain and deliver our vital work. 

Please donate to the Toronto Ward Museum today! All contributions are tax deductible. Your generous support will go a long way to help us achieve our vision — a society that values migrants as makers of Toronto’s past and present, bringing together people of all backgrounds to shape a more just, equitable, and sustainable future.