Funder Focus: Thomas Axworthy and the Historica Foundation
January 5, 2004
By Nicole Zummach
This month in our Funder Focus, we feature the
Historica Foundation,
which was established in 1999 to provide Canadians with a
deeper understanding
of their history and its importance in shaping the future.
CharityVillage
spoke with executive director Thomas Axworthy about
how the foundation
was formed, the various ways that it is working to make
history accessible
to Canadians, and the role that history plays in society.
CharityVillage: This is a very new foundation,
less than five
years old. How did it get started and what is its connection with the
CRB Foundation?
Thomas Axworthy: It actually got started in a fairly
interesting
way. Red Wilson, who was then the chairman of BCE (Bell Canada), was
giving a speech at the business school at York University. He gave a
set of observations that his own children were lamenting
the fact that
somehow they had gotten through the education system with very little
knowledge about Canada. Wilson, as a businessman, thought this was a
shame and that it was something that perhaps business
should do something
about. Just by luck, serendipity really, there was a reporter in the
audience, Gordon Pitts from the Globe and Mail. He thought the
stuff about history was interesting because it wasn't what
you'd normally
expect in a convocation speech from a business leader. So he wrote a
little story about it in Report on Business.
I read the article and called up Charles Bronfman, who I worked for,
and said, 'Red Wilson has made a very interesting speech
about history
and maybe we should get you two together to see whether you
can combine
forces'. And that's what happened. Bronfman gave a very
generous challenge
grant. He said to Wilson, 'If you will pick this up and run with it
I'll make a challenge grant of $25 million'. That was the real key.
So Wilson did that on the condition that I leave the CRB Foundation
and become the director of Historica to help him raise that money to
meet Mr. Bronfman's challenge grant. It's quite an
interesting beginning.
CV: You work to bring more Canadian history into classrooms
and to the general population. Why do you see this as being
important?
What role do history and heritage play in our society?
TA: I think that all of us need a sense of context in our own
family life but we certainly need it societally as well. When wider
problems occur, why are conditions the way they are, what can we do
about them? We are all self-governing men and women, at least we are
if we're lucky enough to live in Canada. The concept of citizenship,
or the concept of holding your own fate in your own hands,
is a pretty
essential part of our definition of what it is to be a Canadian. The
best way to know that is to have some sense of historical knowledge
about why and how the country was formed, why and how problems were
formed, how our predecessors coped with their challenges, and how we
can cope with ours. So, it's history and civics, heritage that gives
us the context for the public part of our lives, our responsibilities
as citizens, as voters, as participants in a self-governing society.
I think history is to citizenship what mathematics is to science, or
what literacy is to language arts. It's kind of a master framework,
a master discipline, that you have to grasp in order for you to carry
out your responsibilities. It's not a luxury; it's not an add-on. The
best single experience we can have is knowing what has gone ahead of
us.
CV: You work with all levels of government, in particular
with the provincial ministries of education. Are there
certain challenges
that arise when working so closely with government agencies?
TA: We try to persuade individual teachers, and principals, and
school boards to adopt our programs and that's huge. There are about
17,000 Canadian schools. It's an incredibly complex,
complicated area,
that's why it's so hard to change within it. So the main
issue I would
have in dealing in the field of education is the complexity
and subtlety
that all school boards are not the same. The inner city Toronto board
is very different than the Halton board. They've got different sets
of problems and different sets of priorities and you really begin to
appreciate the diversity of the country by working with school boards
on the local level. But there is no dictate that forces
schools to adopt
our program. You have to persuade a teacher and a principal
and a board
that this is an exciting learning opportunity for the children, and
that takes a lot of work.
The second key component is that Canada is very
decentralized in education
and it means that you can never have a national program operating on
all its wheels at the same time. There is always one 'go slow' or two
'go slows' somewhere in the country because education is so diverse.
You have to be both realistic and persevering if you are in the job
of trying to change education at the grassroots.
CV: You operate several programs, including heritage fairs,
your YouthLinks exchange program, as well as a Teacher's Institute.
What feedback are you hearing from teachers and young
people about these
programs?
TA: The feedback has been pretty good, but it does vary. For
example, with our YouthLinks program they have to have access to the
Internet and computer labs. We're finding that compared to science or
math programs, which are fairly well established, social studies and
history teachers are pretty low on the pecking order in terms of the
use of school labs. So we've been trying to work with
Computers in Schools
and others to provide those resources. Although I haven't
done a longitudinal
study, we've heard from teachers that students who go into
our Heritage
Fairs program - I think there were 225,000 students last
year - improve
their personal efficacy.
CV: You also produce several resources aimed at
the public,
including the Canadian Online Encyclopedia, your web site,
and Heritage
Minutes, which most people have probably seen on television. What do
you think is the value of a mass media strategy?
TA: I think you have to do both. For one thing, our
success around
Heritage Fairs and getting into the school systems is in part based
on the fact that we are also successful in the media. TV is sexy and
different, and kids love it, and it gives you a certain cachet. The
fact that we were the people who did Heritage Minutes, I just know,
opens up a lot of education doors. If we were just one more
NGO knocking
on the door saying we wanted to do something with
education, well, there
are hundreds of us trying to do that. We're the people who've got the
Canadian Encyclopedia, or we're the people who did the
Emily Carr minute,
or whatever it is. That's been a tremendous opener for us.
Then we find
that when we are trying to talk about the excitement of history, that
showing the Minutes is a great way to get them engaged in
the history.
The two have been nicely complementary. The Heritage Minutes set the
table and then our school-based programming really provides
the menu.
We're also in the process of launching Radio Minutes. That's a whole
new program to add to our media offerings. They'll be radio dramas,
either 60-second or three-minute stories about Canadian
history. Secondly,
there is the Canadian Encyclopedia of Music. Just as we did with the
Canadian Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Music will be
digitized and
put on our web site. You'll be able to put in Gordon Lightfoot, for
example, and hear an example of his singing and then the story of his
life and so on. So we've added a music resource to our
concept of history,
which is the vision our board has set, that history is not just about
politics and battles and constitutions, it's working lives and social
lives and cultural lives. And now we've added music.
CV: You have several very well known media
partners: Southam,
Toronto Star, La Presse, Sympatico, and Canada.com. How important are
these media partners in achieving your mission? What role
do they play?
TA: Well, they're pretty important because when you
look at the
Heritage Minutes for example, the deal that we've arranged is that we
raise the money for the actual Minutes, we produce them,
but their usage
is pro bono by the broadcasters themselves. So that's a
real partnership,
and the same thing will apply in radio.
CV: Although the foundation is itself a registered charity,
it also awards about $200,000 in outreach grants to other
history initiatives.
What types of organizations and initiatives do you support? Why did
you decide to engage in funding as well as providing all your other
services?
TA: About 80% of our programming is on these large
programs that
I've talked about, but we also have a community grants
program, so it's
not just ideas that our staff or board dream up. We have a
very creative
staff but there are lots of different ideas out there. This was a way
of exposing us to the much wider creativity of the Canadian
educational
and cultural community.
We have an independent jury that meets every year and decides on the
community grants, which are grants of up to $15,000. There is just a
huge diversity of projects: museums looking increase their Canadian
collection; movie scripts that are historically based;
software projects.
It shows that right across the country there is an interest
in grassroots
history.
CV: As you move forward, where do you see the
foundation going
in the next few years? What do you hope to achieve?
TA: I've got a very great ambition, which is that every child
in Canada will have a heritage experience. That means
moving the program
up from approximately 200,000 to 400,000 students a year,
which is pretty
big. We now have our highschool program in 600 highschools. I'd like
it to be at 2,000, which is all of them. Then I'd like to
create a Kindergarten-Grade
4 program so that when little guys and gals learn their numbers and
letters that there is also some Canadian content attached to that. So
we've got some really ambitious goals about turning this into truly
a national program in that every Canadian student will have
some aspect
of telling their own story. The whole country is our ambition.
Thomas Axworthy has been executive director of the
Historica Foundation
since it was established in 1999. Previously, he was with
the executive
director of the CRB Foundation. For more information about Historica,
visit www.histori.ca.
