Stories of Belonging: TNO

This work was made possible through ArtWorksTO, in partnership with the City of Toronto, Toronto Arts Foundation, and OCAD University. Hosted by TNO - The Neighbourhood Organization at the Thorncliffe Park Community Hub. 

My Role: Lead Arts Facilitator

Stories of Belonging is a six-session community digital arts project engaging residents of Thorncliffe and Flemingdon Park's youth, adults, seniors, newcomers, and long-term residents in exploring what belonging means to them and their neighbourhood.

The project ran on a simple, accessible workflow: make art by hand, photograph it with a smartphone, and bring it into Adobe Express. That physical-to-digital process meant nobody needed prior technical experience to contribute, and every participant left each session having learned a digital skill alongside making something personal. All of the artwork produced across the six sessions was brought together into a large-scale collective digital mural for the community hub.

The Six Workshops

1 · Mapping Thorncliffe & Flemingdon Park

Participants hand-drew personal maps of the places that matter most to them — schools, parks, restaurants, mosques, community centres, then photographed and labelled them digitally.

2 · Patterns of the Neighbourhood

Outdoor texture printing: pressing clay onto brick, bark, fences, and pavement around Thorncliffe Park, stamping those textures onto card stock, and pairing each print with a photo of its surface.

3 · Cultures of the Neighbourhood

Food poetry in couplets, and written conversations in pairs — each person writing in their first language. Participants spontaneously performed the exchanges aloud, each reading in their own tongue.

4 · Past, Present and Dreams

Three-layer collages built from 1960s–70s archival photos of Thorncliffe Park, present-day drawings and magazine cuttings, and a drawn vision of the future.

5 · Know Your Neighbours

Working in small groups of strangers, participants made individual sheets about their own cultures — then shared sheets about what they have in common, and what they all love doing at Thorncliffe Park.

6 · What Makes a Community?

Portraits and self-portraits, reflections on what each person brings to the community, and letters written to a future resident of Thorncliffe Park.

How the Community Shaped It

Every session opened with a singing bowl meditation and was designed as a standalone experience, so first-time participants got a complete session while returning participants saw the continuity. Activities used guided templates and fill-in-the-blank prompts to remove blank-page anxiety without limiting personal expression.

Some of the strongest moments were unplanned. The archival photos drew a collective "wow" — residents recognized the old horse racing track and traced how their neighbourhood had changed across decades. And when a written cross-language conversation turned into a live performance, with each participant reading in their own language, it became the standout moment of the whole series. The conversations that happen while making art are as much the work as the art itself.