New Year’s Message from the Chief Executive Officer
by Susanne Tabata, CEO
On behalf of the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society – the board & staff – Happy New Year, akemashite omedeto gozaimasu, 明けましておめでとうございます!
2023 was a fruitful year that saw us engaging in deep conversations in communities large and small throughout the country, working with staff and advisors to develop and implement programs serving Japanese Canadians across generations, and laying the groundwork for ongoing community engagement.
We are hopeful that the movement on The Japanese Canadian Survivors Health and Wellness Fund will lead to an opening of health support grants for our seniors very soon, as our elders are the reason we do this work. The Japanese Canadian Survivors Health & Wellness Fund Society has provided an update on the following page, and we join that society in thanking our elders for their patience.
As we enter 2024 with a fully engaged staff, we are carrying on with the programs we directly manage. Much of our focus has been on promoting and assessing applications for the Community Fund, which is the most forward looking initiative and the only initiative accessible to Japanese Canadians in all provinces. We are grateful to our staff who worked through the holiday season, with a special thank you to Community Fund Manager Larissa Higo and the community fund team of Yumi Kawaoka, Chiaki Yamada, Eleanor Clarke, and John Endo Greenaway. We welcome our new Intergenerational Wellness Manager Chika Buston.
The BC Heritage Sites program has begun and we have identified 31 Japanese Canadian Heritage Sites in BC, the full slate which will be announced in March. We will be honouring the legacies of communities in northern BC, the central coast, Vancouver Island the the gulf islands, the farming communities on both sides of the north arm of the Fraser River, along with internment and self-supporting sites. It has been a very fulfilling process to work with Linda Kawamoto Reid, Lane McGarrity and Rebecca Boschman on this phase of discovery and research.
A key project is the legacy monument in Victoria, where we will be working directly with the Ministry of Citizens’ Services as the Province prepares for a public tender for design in the spring. The research on the list of names for the monument is nearing completion, and there is a final callout for a community review of names in this issue of The Bulletin. We thank the team at the University of Victoria and its director Michael Abe for over one year of research on this project.
Teacher Education Resources are underway led by Mike Perry Whittingham and a team of teachers drawn from across the province, who are developing a Japanese Canadian History Learning Portal and a Digital Course for Teacher Training.
All of which is to say, we continue to work hard on multiple fronts to fulfill our promises to the Japanese Canadian Community.