KWIC is Connecting for Change in Peterborough and Around the World

12/17/2019

Dynamic Youth-led Resources Make a Difference in our Community

Rosemary Ganley
The Peterborough Examiner
November 27, 2019

Students participate in a workshop entitled "Stories of Water in Nogojiwanong" during the "Local Global Youth Day" conference presented by Kawartha World Issues Centre (KWIC) on March 23, 2018, at The Mount Community Centre in Peterborough, ON. CLIFFORD SKARSTEDT/EXAMINER

The Kawartha World Issues Centre is the amazing little group that has fostered many progressive projects over 30 years in our city: GreenUP, Teaching Outside the Box, Kawartha Food Share, ReFrame Film Festival and TRACKS for Indigenous youth. These are organizations that shape our values.

I have lived in Peterborough for 50 years, and for 30 of those years I have had a small hand in, and watched with admiration of, the development of a group started by the community and then enlarged to include the university.
It is today a highly influential, dynamic, youth-led resource which shapes what we stand for as a city and whom we elect to office.

And with one and a half staff.

The Kawartha World Issues Centre grew, as healthy movements do, organically. In the early 1980s, a few people interested in international affairs and in Canada's role around the world, who were operating as volunteers in such groups as Oxfam and the International Development Education Program at Fleming, merged their small budgets and their person-power.

Some names are still active 30 years on: Alan and Linda Slavin, Don Quarrie and Stephanie Benn, for example. "It was a caring, connected, joyful social-justice community," says Debra Morales, who wrote a 44-page history of KWIC in 2004.

The name for the organization was suggested by Alan Slavin: it had a nice ring: "KWIC."

The group moved from Fleming College to 106 Murray St. in 1998, making it more accessible to downtown. The late Jim Anderson and teacher Don Quarrie guaranteed the mortgage for the space.

In that period, the Canadian government was supporting global education centres across the country. In spite of their achievements helping Canadians learn accurately about the world and take action to better it, the federal government withdrew support. Peterborough's is the last Ontario one operating.

From its current home on the Trent campus in the Science Complex building, KWIC operates as a nonprofit, run by an active board of directors. It benefits from the passion and knowledge of its longtime executive director, Julie Cosgrove, and commitment from many sectors.
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