The Resemblage Project is delighted to announce a multi-year, SSHRC-funded community-engaged research collaboration with TAIBU Community Health Centre in Toronto.
Launched in 2024, Digital Kuumba: Connecting Our Stories is a two-year intergenerational digital storytelling initiative that supports Black and racialized older adults in the eastern Greater Toronto Area (GTA) to share their lived experiences, cultural knowledge, and community histories through creative digital media.
TAIBU Community Health Centre has a longstanding mandate to deliver high-quality arts-based programming that advances self-determination, wellness, and social connection among Black and racialized older adults. This partnership extends that mandate through creative research programming that centres community voices, intergenerational knowledge sharing, and digital inclusion.
This project (UofT REB#47886) is led by Andrea Charise, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Black and racialized adults aged 50 and over are invited to participate in structured creative workshops and research activities that support story-making, storytelling, and intergenerational exchange using accessible digital tools.
The first program, Digital Kuumba: Connecting Our Stories, launched on March 10, 2025 as a 10-week digital storytelling series. Participants create their own digital stories while contributing to a broader arts-led, mixed-methods research study. As of January 2026, approximately 30 Black and racialized older adults have participated in Digital Kuumba programs and associated research activities.
In addition to producing original digital stories, the Resemblage Project’s Digital Kuumba program uses arts-based and mixed research methods to examine how digital storytelling can support aging well, cultural continuity, intergenerational learning, and community-engaged knowledge production within Black and racialized communities in Toronto. For example:
- What are the experiences of aging and older age that emerge through digital storytelling methods for Black and racialized older adults?
- How might stories of aging by Black and racialized older adults inform and sustain culturally supportive arts-programming for older adults in the GTA, at TAIBU and beyond?
- How does community-engaged digital storytelling offer insights into Afrocentric values of intergenerational knowledge exchange (both online and in person)?
- Drawing from questions 1-3, how might digital storytelling as an arts engagement method inform emergent theorizations of social wellness and the role of digital arts in supporting age-positive society in the GTA and Canada more broadly?
If you would like to learn more about participating in this project, please email [email protected] for more information.
