A Vancouver UBC student is spearheading an initiative to create a Black Library that she hopes will become a community center.
Maya Preshyon said she was inspired to create the facility after realizing that Vancouver does not have cultural spaces for the Black community that other major cities have.
“We have seen the shortage of infrastructure for the Black community and we are trying to come up with a solution,” Preshyon told Global News.
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“As a space, it is of course a library, but also a community gathering. It will be a place where people can come to study, where people can chill, where people can just come to work without paying for a coffee every hour. ”
Preyshon said she also intends for the library to fulfill a community role, where people can host workshops or group therapy sessions.
Ideally, the library would be located near the former site of Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver’s historic Black neighborhood that was destroyed in the 1970s to make way for the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts.
“Hogan’s Alley was just a place for people from the Black community and the Black diaspora to come together and have their cultural center,” Preyshon said, adding that the history of the area has received little recognition until recently.
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“I’m a black person in Vancouver, and I was never taught about what happened to Hogan’s Alley. I did not know that Vancouver has a Black neighborhood; “I did not know Jimi Hendrix was here.”
Preyshon recognizes local community groups and activists with renewed interest in Hogan’s Alley, and said it is a movement she hopes to be a part of.
Meanwhile, Preyshon and her associates are looking for a location, raising money and trying to raise as many books as possible.
They are compiling book drives and have compiled a “wish list” of about 150 titles.
“We have a priority on books, literature, works written by black writers, place an emphasis and importance on the Black experience, and work in that vein,” she said.
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That said, organizers want the space to be a functional library with as large a variety as possible, and will not turn down any book, she said.
Interest in the idea seems to be huge.
Preyshon Launches Library GoFundMe Campaign a week ago, and quickly reached its initial goal of $ 6,000.
She has now raised that goal to $ 35,000 in hopes of securing a one-year lease for the library when it opens.
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Reference-globalnews.ca