Tourism Kingston Mobile Legacy Space
A travelling space for learning, reflection, and ReconciliACTION.
Our Commitment
Tourism Kingston is Kingston's destination marketing organization, and reconciliation is part of how we do that work. Through this five-year partnership with The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund, we're bringing a Mobile Legacy Space to meetings, conventions, and events across the country, creating space for delegates to learn, reflect, and take their own steps toward reconciliation. This is an extension of work we believe belongs at the centre of Canada's meetings and events industry.
“"We didn't want reconciliation to be a line in a strategic plan. We wanted it to be something delegates could actually walk into and sit with. That's what this space is for."”
About The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund
The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund (DWF) is a Canadian registered charity working to build understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and to inspire action toward reconciliation.
The Fund grew out of Gord Downie's Secret Path project, the album, graphic novel, and animated film he created to share Chanie Wenjack's story after learning it from his brother Mike. Gord Downie's family and the Wenjack family founded DWF together to continue that work: providing educational resources, training, ReconciliACTION planning tools, and the Legacy Spaces program that brings this history into workplaces and events across Canada.
What is the Mobile Legacy Space?
The Mobile Legacy Space is a dedicated educational and reflection space that travels to meetings and industry events across Canada. Wherever it goes, it carries:
- Official Legacy Space recognition
- Artwork inspired by Secret Path
- Indigenous storytelling and educational materials
- Information about Chanie Wenjack
- Information about residential schools
- Learning opportunities about Canada's true history and reconciliation efforts
For conference and meeting delegates, it's a place to pause between sessions and engage with something that matters. For event organizers, it's a way to build meaningful reconciliation content into a conference without starting from scratch.
Learning Through Storytelling
Chanie Wenjack was twelve years old when he died trying to walk home from the residential school where he'd been sent, hundreds of kilometres from his family. His story is one of thousands, but it's the one that reached Gord Downie, and through Secret Path, it reached the rest of the country.
The Mobile Legacy Space shares that story alongside the broader history of the residential school system in Canada, not as something in the past, but as something still shaping the present. It's built on Indigenous storytelling and perspective, and on the understanding that learning this history is the starting point for reconciliation, not the end of it.
ReconciliACTION in Practice
Reconciliation isn't a destination. It's ongoing work, and DWF's term for that, ReconciliACTION, is a reminder that learning must be followed by action.
For Tourism Kingston, that means:
- Educating our staff and the visitors who come through our events
- Building and maintaining relationships with Indigenous partners
- Sharing Indigenous stories and perspectives through our platform
- Creating space for reconciliation-focused learning
- Keeping this commitment active for the full life of the partnership, not just at launch
Bring the Legacy Space to Your Event
The Mobile Legacy Space is available to association meeting planners, conference organizers, corporate event professionals, and convention planners hosting events with Tourism Kingston.
Bringing the space into your event means:
- A dedicated area for reconciliation-focused learning and reflection, built into your programming
- An engagement opportunity for delegates that goes beyond the standard conference experience
- A concrete way to support your organization's own commitments to diversity, inclusion, and reconciliation
Interested in featuring the Legacy Space at your event? Reach out to Ted Robinson, Business Events Specialist to learn more.
