Black leaders recruited to support OCAD U students, staff & community partners
November 18, 2019
The Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) University Faculty of Design has never had a full-time Black faculty member in its 143-year history.
Dr. Elizabeth ‘Dori’ Tunstall vows that will change before she leaves Canada’s oldest and largest art and design educational institution.
Last May, the Faculty of Design Dean launched the Black Sparks Movement that’s a special donor group seeking to recruit 100 Black leaders who will commit to contributing a minimum $100 monthly to support OCAD U’s Black students, staff and community partners.
A portion of the $7 million goal will be used to do a Black cluster hire.
Tunstall expects the 100 leaders will be recruited before the end of the year.
“The reason the number is 100 is because that’s the maximum amount of people who I can personally be accountable to,” said the world’s first and only Black Dean of Design. “There is 100 people that I can take phone calls from, meet with and listen to what they think OCAD U should be doing. They will receive special invitations to events and, more importantly, help advise me on how OCAD U can better support Black people in Toronto, North America and globally.”
The idea for the initiative came from close friend Jerusha Richards.
“She told me if I set up a really good structure, people would be willing to give, particularly if they see me doing good things in the community,” said Tunstall. “I want to cultivate a community of Black Sparks as part of building a deeper connection with the university. I am not just asking for money. I am asking for people to help be stewards of the institution, how it engages with the Black community and how it supports our students and the connection with that. For me, it’s like a movement.”
Tunstall signed a five-year contract with the university in August 2016. Reporting to the Vice-President, Academic & Provost, she’s responsible for the educational and research leadership, development and supervision of the Faculty of Design.
The Design Anthropologist and advocate intends to re-sign if offered a new contract.
“When I came here, a lot of Black leaders didn’t see OCAD U as a place they would need to support because there weren’t enough of us here or they hadn’t seen any good works,” noted Tunstall who was an Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia where she created a Master’s and graduate diploma of design program that focuses on developing students and practitioners who could understand people’s values and design and evaluate their experiences within and across cultures. “Because I represent the university, people are able to connect with what I am doing for the university as a whole as opposed to just me Dori if I was just a faculty member.
“I am a Black person living in the community and that means I am present if there is an event going on. OCAD U doesn’t have a lot of money, but we carry a lot of social capital and there are calls I can make that will be answered not because I am making them, but because of OCAD U’s weight as a 143-year-old institution. I have to be present in the community to be able to connect the community to the resources we have in terms of our students who need to be connected to the community. Not all of them are from Toronto and even if they are, they may be part of their very own specific community and they aren’t reaching across to other different communities for their professional development, but also their sense of self and culture as well.”
Serious about addressing the under-representation of Blacks in design, Tunstall established the Black Youth Design Initiative (BYSI) that’s a model for the institution on how it becomes part of the community.
The Black Sparks fundraising campaign will support Black artists and designers by funding OCAD U’s BYSI that includes the ‘Black Reach’ program that offers ‘Imagine, Make and Connect’ workshops for Black youth between the ages of eight and 12 as well as the ‘Design4’ program.
The Ford Foundation, an international social justice philanthropy with a $13 billion endowment and $600 million in annual grant making, made a $65,000 commitment earlier this year to support the initiative.
“The Foundation doesn’t support post-secondary institutions,” said Tunstall who was born in South Carolina and raised in Indianapolis. “The giving of this money was really because of its President (Darren Walker is a Black American). He gave it as really a challenge for me and the community. It’s like he said, ‘I know you are doing really good things and here is a little bit of base money that will serve as an impetus for us to go out and get others to contribute because they now know that the work you are doing is serious’.”
She said there’s a lot of programming that OCAD U want to support for students and outreach to the Black community.
“That does require resources because I have a very important policy around not engaging our students in volunteerism,” noted Tunstall. “So it is like the price of everything is really the price of the labour that we want to pay our students a living wage for the care work they are doing and how they want to connect their skills and knowledge as designers to the Black community. That cost money. It is that thing where this is an exchange of we want to bring value, but we want to do it in a sustainable way.”
Some of the funds from the Ford Foundation commitment will be used to subsidize workshops for eight community partners who serve Black youths as part of the three-hour ‘Black Reach’ project.
Tunstall said it took nearly 18 months piloting, prototyping and developing the program.
“At the start of the three hours, we ask young people why design matter,” she said. “Black Panther is normally the example we use. We live in a world where we don’t normally see ourselves reflected. As designers, these are the people who make everything around us. If we make it in our own image with our own values, imagine how we would feel about the spaces we live in, the things that we use and the way that we dress. After the introduction, we ask them to talk about themselves and some of the problems they are facing. We receive a range of responses from getting bullied at school and not finishing homework on time to gun violence. We say OK, and ask them to design these problems. We ask them if there’s something they want to say and are unable to say and let them know that’s what Communication Design is about. If there’s something that’s broken and need to be fixed, we let them know that’s what is done in Industrial Design and if they feel unsafe and want an environment to be created for them to feel more safe and secure, they are told there is a whole field of design that focusses on that.
“We get them thinking about what the solutions will be and they sketch it out, we talk about it and then they make real kind of prototypes about what that can be. We also talk about slavery and colonization and how some of the problems that we experience is tied to these structures, these rules or ideals that say, ‘Oh, you aren’t smart enough so you can’t make that happen, you should be able to have this, but you aren’t working hard enough. We break down all of that to say the problems you are facing isn’t just about you. It’s about this whole structure and system which means that the thing that you are making isn’t just for you. It can change the system, so then how would you need to change the design. The ideal ‘Black Reach’ is to have a multi-generational team coming out being able to say to these young people at a fairly vulnerable age that, ‘You are smart and you know how to solve these particular problems’.”
The ‘Design4’ program provides paid professional opportunities to upper-year OCAD U students.
A total of nine Black students and recent alumni will work in teams of three in three Black community organizations or businesses. Working 10 hours weekly, they will be paid $22 an hour.
Tunstall started the Cultures-Based Innovation initiative – a global network of designers, anthropologists, indigenous scholars & activists, innovation consultants, computer scientists and leadership scholars – to define and implement more inclusive and decolonizing perspectives on innovation.
“Decolonizing is really giving the most vulnerable control over the street party,” she said.
