General Meeting - Speaker: Marva Wisdom - Securing Our Collective Heritage

Our speaker for February, Black History Month, will be Marva Wisdom, whose talk is entitled "Securing our Collective Heritage". Inspired by the Underground Railroad as a living history, Heritage Hall, at 83 Essex Street in downtown Guelph, stands as a metaphor of cultural self-determination that can be shared with immigrant and culturally diverse peoples living in Guelph. Today the Guelph Black Heritage Society preserves the historical significance of this important building by creating a cultural, historical and social centre within Guelph and Wellington County.

Marva Wisdom, M.A. (Leadership) is a Senior Fellow at Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy (U of T) and a Fellow of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. She is a senior equity, inclusion and leadership practitioner, keynote speaker, researcher, and the City of Guelph’s external lead advisor with a goal to set the community standard for eliminating systemic racism.  Marva is also one of the founding members and director of outreach for the well-received Black Experience research project – a 7-year study, led by Environics Institute and partners, and she directs Musagetes Foundation’s international Arts Everywhere Festival.

Marva co-authored the newly released book, Collecting Courage – Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love http://collectingcourage.org