A Message from Dean Lisa Henderson

October 2024

Headshot of Lisa Henderson standing in the FIMS & Nursing BuildingDear Alumni,

Earlier this Fall it was a pleasure to discover that the Blyth Festival, in its 50th season, featured a play titled Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz by Alison Lawrence. Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz is about a group of young women who were farm workers in Canada during the summers of the Second World War, as young men headed overseas.  For many, it was their first experience with farm labour, living away from big cities in Ontario Farm Service Camps, and with the distinctive kinds of friendship that come from leaving home and working outdoors. In so many ways, the Farmerettes, as they were known, kept Canadian agriculture going. 

Lawrence’s play was based on the 2019 book of the same title by Western alumna Shirleyan English (BA’62, Journalism) and co-author Bonnie Sitter. I grew up in Southern Ontario and so did my parents and grandparents.  But did I know about the Farmerettes? Not until I met Shirleyan and read her book in 2021.  

Shirleyan was a Farmerette herself and had amazing stories to tell. She visited FIMS following a gift in memory of her husband Douglas English. Both Shirleyan and Douglas were journalists in the course of their careers at the London Free Press. Shirleyan’s gift established the Douglas L. English Memorial Bursary, which provides an annual scholarship to a student in our Master of Media in Journalism and Communication program.

All our FIMS alumni and donors have distinguished stories and I love hearing and reading them. Some alumni are well-known to many of us, like CBC’s National correspondent and co-host of The National Adrienne Arsenault (MA’92, Journalism), but to a person you have lived remarkable lives, lives we’re proud to have had a hand in. One of the gifts of my role is meeting with alumni in London, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montréal, or wherever my travels and our alumni community take me. I never tire of your guidance, insight, or stories.

Recent Alumni Snapshots

 

Can we persuade you to contribute your alumni story? We recently launched an online form that allows you to tell us your story in your own words. We have a number of places on our website where we could potentially share some of your accounts, including on our Alumni Stories and Donor Stories pages (with permission). We also have our 25th Anniversary gallery of stories and images called FIMS+ Memories, 1945-2024.  

Some of your stories have arrived with financial gifts to FIMS, and we are grateful. You support our students in so many direct and indirect ways, with scholarships, travel funds, and all the up-to-the-moment hardware and software that prepares them for school, careers, and the world. You support Indigenous academic achievement and student athletes in FIMS. You support our co-curricular programs like the annual Media Arts Festival and our continuing roster of public events—all of them essential resources in graduate and undergraduate education.

But know that your stories are gifts with or without contributions to FIMS. They inspire us, especially our students, they connect our past, present and future, and they remind us of how a FIMS education enters the stream of personal and public life. We welcome and celebrate all your stories—of achievement, of struggle, of work and community.

Finally, some events and milestones:

On Western’s Homecoming weekend in September I got to celebrate with Susan Haigh, MLIS’87, Executive Director of CARL/ABRC, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, and recipient of this year’s Award of Merit for Professional Achievement from the Western Alumni Association. Kadie Philp (formerly Kadie Ward) was also in the house to receive the Faculty of Arts & Humanities’ Alumni Award of Achievement. Kadie (BA'05, MA'07, Media Studies) earned degrees from both FIMS and A&H. 

On October 2 and 3, FIMS colleagues launched The Starling Centre for Just Technologies and Just Societies with great keynotes and panels at Museum London and a socially conscious tech exhibit called The Glass Room at the Satellite Project Space in downtown London. Starling is FIMS’ first research centre, whose collaborators include Professors Alissa Centivany, Alison Hearn, Joanna Redden and Luke Stark along with Research Co-ordinator Dorotea Gucciardo. You can read all about it here!

Our NDTR event, a screening of Silent No More: A Virtual Tour of the Former Mohawk Institute Residential School was standing-room-only in the Weldon Library Community Room on September 30, with 140 people forming a field of orange shirts. The screening was hosted by FIMS, co-sponsored by the Deans of Western University, and featured a conversation after the screening with Indigenous community members Professor Sally Kewayosh, principal collaborator on the film, Lydell Mitchell, cinematographer, and Burton and Lucille Kewayosh, Sally’s parents and both community leaders from Walpole Island First Nation. It was an exposing, demanding, and open-hearted conversation among panelists and with our audience of students, staff, faculty, deans, community members and a few FIMS alumni. Sally, thank you. 

Later this month, FIMS will host a group at the annual fundraiser of the CJFE, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. CJFE supports journalists at risk around the world. Co-Presidents Carol Off and Michelle Shephard will convene the occasion, where FIMS will welcome distinguished alumni practitioners including CBC anchor and host Heather Hiscox, Toronto Star Editor in Chief Nicole MacIntyre, and Carly Weeks, long-time health journalist at the Globe and Mail and now VP Communications at St. Joseph’s Health, Hamilton. We look forward to introducing our new Program Chair of the Master of Media in Journalism and Communication program, Professor Chris Arsenault.

To all of our FIMS alum, we miss you, we love hearing from you, and we send our thanks.

Warm wishes,

Lisa Henderson