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Sept. 27, 2013
A bus trip for tolerance
Tour for Humanity is a mobile education centre.
SHERI SHEFA CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS
The Tour for Humanity will help the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) bring its message of tolerance, inclusivity, justice and human rights to millions of Ontarians.
A “mobile tolerance education centre,” the Tour for Humanity, is a $1 million, retrofitted, 42-foot Fleetwood bus that has been re-engineered to accommodate a 32-seat theatre. The initiative, for which FSWC has raised $2.4 million, is designed to bring its educational programs beyond the Greater Toronto area to the entire province.
FSWC president and chief executive officer Avi Benlolo said that while his organization offers classes about tolerance and social justice issues at their Yonge Street offices, there are many people living outside of Toronto to whom the classes aren’t accessible.
“We thought about building a museum in the hope that people would come. Drawing people from outlying areas is a difficult problem,” Benlolo said, adding that small Ontario communities like Stratford, St. Jacobs,
Orangeville and Dundas are underserved when it comes to programming that promotes tolerance and inclusivity.
“The question was, how can we really project our influence much further and get to more people? The answer seemed quite clear: we take our program to them.”
The Tour for Humanity will travel from town to town to offer workshops for students, educators and law enforcement representatives on topics including the Holocaust, genocide, bullying, heroes and leadership.
“There is no mobile training centre like this anywhere else,” Benlolo said. “We completely retrofitted and re-engineered most of it.”
The mobile centre features an interactive film that can sync up with viewers’ iPads. There will be a question and answer component in which students will be prompted to answer questions on the iPads and a program will tabulate their responses.
“We also built in a lift to make it wheelchair accessible because we’re all about inclusivity. The first person to have used the lift is the lieutenant-governor of Ontario, David Onley.”
Onley – along with Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne – was on hand earlier this month to launch the initiative with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Onley applauded FSWC for developing a community outreach project that can both educate and inspire.
“That’s when learning is most effective – when it illuminates and guides who we are…. It can change lives,” he said.
Benlolo said that although more than $2 million has already been raised, FSWC will continue to raise funds to sustain the project for years to come. “We’ve had an incredible amount of people who have pledged to finance it,” he said. The Ontario Trillium Foundation gave FSWC a $500,000 grant, with the rest of the funds coming from private donors.
FSWC board of governors member Dorothy Shoichet, whose family donated money to help realize this ambitious project, said it’s the most creative educational tool she’s ever seen.
“It is an exciting opportunity to get to young minds before they become corrupted by myth and rumor,” Shoichet said.
Once people learn about this initiative, other organizations will want to follow suit, she predicted. When more funds become available, FSWC will buy and retrofit more buses to give the project a wider reach, she added.
Shoichet, who called her first time on the bus a thrilling, “life-changing experience,” said that for this initiative, the possibilities are endless. “It’s the beginning of the end of racism. I don’t make that statement carelessly. It’s the end of racism and antisemitism, first in Ontario, then in Canada, then North America and, hopefully, the world.”
Benlolo said sensitivity training is very much needed, considering the prevalence of bullying and incidents such as the one that involved students at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, who were caught on tape singing a chant that promoted non-consensual sex with underage girls earlier this month.
“Communities want these kinds of programs to respond to these incidents,” he said.
Benlolo expects that the bus will make its first trip in October.
– For more national Jewish news, visit cjnews.com.
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