Valuing Our Stories to enrich our future

01 Oct 2024
Valuing Our Stories graphic
01 Oct 2024

Dear Staff and Student Colleagues

We have just emerged from a month in which we have had varied reflections of our heritage, including the celebration of Heritage Day on 24 September. As a faculty, we have inherited a distinguished legacy and multifaceted heritage, and each of us has a varied experience of that heritage which marks who we are and who we are constantly becoming.

We have been crafting a space on our website called Valuing Our Stories. This will be a place for recalling, for listening with compassion and for learning new lessons of how we can become in a shared and complex future. Today I launch the Valuing Our Stories campaign to gather your stories and to grow through learning from your insights.

Valuing Our Stories (Ons Wardeer Ons Stories; Simelana Nani)is an attempt to tease out the complexity of our past and commit to a constantly renewing present. The objective of this project is to build a digital collection of stories upon which our knowledge is created and recreated. You are all invited as members of the Faculty collaborative — staff or student, past or present — to express yourself in the form of video, writing, podcast or art in a way that is true to your spirit. All are invited, whether you have lived through difficult experiences of prejudice or witnessed prejudice and have reflected on the impact at the time or in retrospect.

There is a form to indicate your interest in participating.

Please circulate this widely with friends, colleagues and classmates associated with the Faculty. It is my fervent desire that your story does not go unnoticed and that this Faculty develops an archive that will have a meaningful impact on future generations. The future of this Faculty is contingent on our education about the past, the present and who we undertake to be as a collective in the future.

Join us on this journey to deepen our collective story and sharpen our future vision towards health equity.

Kaise ke gangans
Associate Professor Lionel Green-Thompson
Dean: Faculty of Health Sciences