October 22 was a big day for Hart House. For the first time in 90 years, the university’s extracurricular hub released a new vision statement.
“Hart House is a living laboratory of social, artistic, cultural, and recreational experiences where all voices, rhythms, and traditions converge,” read the statement. “As the vibrant home for the education of the mind, body, and spirit envisioned by its founders, Hart House encourages and supports activities that provide spaces for awakening the capacity for self-knowledge and self-expression.”
“We’re not pushing aside the Founder’s Prayer,” said Louise Cowin, warden of Hart House, in an interview with The Varsity. The Founders Prayer references the previous mission statement, etched into the stone on the building’s east wall.
Hart House was founded as a place for students to explore artistic, cultural, and recreational opportunities outside the classroom. Before 1972 it was restricted to only males.
“Only in a forty-year period has Hart House even admitted women,” said Cowin. “It isn’t a long time ago in terms of number of years, but there have been exponential changes in society since then.” She added that the new vision statement is an attempt to reflect those shifts by being “representative of the diversity and complexity of today’s student body.”
Cowin attributed the amount of time between the house admitting women and the birth of a new vision statement to the environment created by University of Toronto’s students. “I think it has to be directly related to the change in the body of students. My predecessors were able to talk about the Founder’s Prayer with it still having reference to today even though the language is somewhat dated. And I didn’t feel that we could continue to say that the sentiments were still true today.”
Hart House’s position relative to the University of Toronto can be hard to pinpoint. “The way Hart House’s operational budget comes together is that Hart House receives half of its operating funds from a student ancillary fee,” said Cowin. “So, really, it’s driven by the students who pay for Hart House.”
However, Cowin also describes the house as “a gateway between the university and the city. Our budget now is such that we need to rely on this external revenue to balance the books.”
The transition to the new mission statement will occur through programming. “We’re going to begin to work towards inclusion that is meaningful so that a greater number of students are identifying [Hart House] as a place to call home and to hang their hats,” said Cowan. “Hart House might become an umbrella or a coalition for groups to actually have opportunities to actually gain access to space and to dollars.”
Cowin hopes the statement will help Hart House be more inclusive, as opposed to what she describes as an institution that has “been very rigid and limited.”
