If Pier 21 was an immigration gateway Toronto, and the Ward in particular, was a destination.  The staff and volunteers at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 look forward to partnering with the Ward Museum to tell “the rest of the story” in innovative ways that bring historic and contemporary migration stories together.

The Toronto Ward Museum is an innovative and interactive cultural and educative program that will recognize the roots of Toronto’s rich immigrant history and merge it with current and future immigrant experiences and contributions to our great city.

The Toronto Ward Museum stands apart from previous attempts as it places immigrant communities at the very centre of its creation and programming. It is both a necessary and ground-breaking addition to Toronto's rich cultural landscape. OCASI looks forward to championing an initiative like the Toronto Ward Museum, as it will highlight the multiple histories of immigration and ethnic communities in Toronto.

Heritage Toronto is excited to partner with Toronto Ward Museum and to tell the stories of the people, places, and events that shaped The Ward and the diversity of our city.

Hart House is pleased to be a supporting partner of the Toronto Ward Museum. Our exhibit, “…but I still can’t vote” gives voice to an “outsider” population who have greatly contributed to building their communities even without full citizenship or the right to vote. The mission of the Toronto Ward Museum is the perfect fit for our exhibit and for Hart House’s ongoing commitment to serving as a forum where students of the University of Toronto and other members of the community can learn from one another through the exchange of different narratives.

Every great city needs a space where the stories of newer immigrants can meet and mingle with the stories of older arrivals, creating a dialogue that allows all to appreciate the long history of everyday struggles and soaring hopes that built Toronto.

Passages Canada is excited to support the Toronto Ward Museum—an initiative that, by telling Toronto’s migration stories, new and old, will spark valuable cross-cultural dialogues and bring to light many untold stories of this increasingly diverse city.

The Ward holds forever a spot in Toronto’s history. Although most of the bricks and mortar that once filled the neighbourhood are long gone, its legacy and stories will endure through initiatives like the Toronto Ward Museum. While Toronto is celebrated and recognized for its diversity, history shows that the path to today’s successes was not without obstacles and hardships. Remembering the past is integral to steering the present and future.

The Ward Museum is an exciting and inspiring initiative which will make Toronto’s history of immigration visible and meaningful for today’s multicultural citizens.  The museum’s vision, which is based on a collaborative and inclusive model, speaks to the awareness that well established immigrants and newcomer communities should speak to each other and learn from their diverse experiences.  The extremely creative, passionate and knowledgeable team at TWM is building more than a museum, creating a space for dialogue about Toronto’s past, present and future.

The labour of feeding a city falls largely to immigrants: restaurant workers, market vendors, home cooks, and gardeners. By sharing their stories, the Toronto Ward Museum will likewise nourish the soul of a great city.

The Toronto Ward Museum is a long anticipated venture that will educate and inspire Canadians and mobile people worldwide to hear its stories and gather their own. As a new Canadian and a historian of migration, I am eager to learn from its collections and use them in my classes. Kudos and thanks to its dedicated team.

One of the sad things about Toronto is that we continually lose spaces that were once the sites of struggle, joy, livelihood and community created by people who came to the city and worked - often in the shadows - to make it what it is.  When we lose the places they created, we also compromise our understanding of the city.  Initiatives like the Ward Museum help us to regain those memories and challenge more conventional narratives of immigration and settlement.

Toronto has a rich heritage of immigrants and the foodways they brought with them. Toronto's Ward Museum is helping us all understand how the global table enriches our lives, shapes our city, and represents a key pillar of our economy.

The Toronto Ward Museum is inspired by the power of personal storytelling and focused on engaging newcomers as storytellers.  Its approach has the potential to make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of the Toronto immigration experience, and of the city itself.

The Toronto Ward Museum is a much needed project to help connect the city’s past and present.  With an outstanding team and a bold vision, this project will surely take its place as one of the most important public history projects in the country.

Art is a powerful way of sharing the experiences and values that shape our identities. When moving to a new country, each and every person has a different story to tell. Art communicates beyond language, fostering a deeper understanding of ourselves and others while allowing the artist to share in the culture and community of their new home.

The Toronto Ward Museum promises to be Canada's response to the internationally renown Tenement Museum in New York City - a place where stories of immigration and urban life are creatively shared with young and old alike. Oral history has the power to make history come alive, making important connections between the past and present.

The structure the Toronto Ward Museum proposes is also uniquely situated to weather the precarious economic realities cultural institutions are facing. The model is highly scalable and adaptive to shifts and changing circumstances. The proposal to partner and embed themselves into existing infrastructure holds the potential to be bring new talent and dynamism into these organizations and build capacity that can be carried into the future.

The Toronto Ward Museum offers our community a unique opportunity to determine how our stories are being told and how our community is being represented.  We welcome the opportunity to be part of this amazing project. It is an important initiative for the City.

By sharing the same values and goals, we hope, with the help of the Toronto Ward Museum, to uncover the rich, diverse and complex, but less visible, legacy of our migrant population.