Rest and Resilience is a remote, facilitated, multi-arts workshop series that engages and supports BIPOC-identifying youth and adults ages 16+. Using writing, drawing, music, and other creative activities and guided by Lead Artist-Facilitator Nadia Chaney, participants will explore their experiences as BIPOC-identifying residents living in their respective communities. ANS will offer Rest and Resilience via Zoom, from October 22nd to November 26th, 2021 to up to 30 BIPOC-identifying participants in Guelph, Hamilton, and surrounding areas.

HAL is an ongoing activist project with a community focus operated by a collective of artists and writers. HAL publishes Hamilton Arts and Letters, a biannual magazine presenting new literary works, graphic novel excerpts, exploratory writing, poetry, literary non-fiction, and the work of visual, audio, and film artists. The magazine encourages the development of emerging writers and artists. This year, CCENA is supporting the magazine’s effort to build up its subscriber list.

CCENA is partnering with the Afro-Canadian Caribbean Association and the Hamilton Black History Council to hire a summer researcher, Aaron Parry, to research and assemble an online “one-stop shop” for locating Hamilton Black History resources and archives. At present, many historical sources exist in scattered places, and the idea here is to create a portal that can enable the community, who may not have inside access to various archives (McMaster, Hamilton Public Library, Stewart Memorial Church, etc.) to find relevant materials on Black life in Hamilton.

Keeping Six works with people who use drugs and/or experience homelessness, developing their capacity to express their views and advocate for their own needs via writing, photography, etc. This project involved generating a series of writing workshops to develop community members’ writing ability and knowledge and thus strengthen the zine’s quality and outreach.

This project involved CCENA’s partnership in supporting two hearing-impaired actors to participate in the Decolonise Your Ears New Play Festival (June 22-26 2021) by supplying ASL translators. The translation also meant that the entire festival was accessible to hard-of-hearing audiences.

This project involves six storyteller artists who develop community capacity in their practice by leading a one-hour workshop on their discipline for the other members of the six artists. They then in turn develop a 1.5-hour workshop to deliver to community members on these various narrative practices so they can develop their own story-telling capacity. The resulting stories and artworks made by these community members (and the six artists) will be assembled into a zine.