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While the region has a significant senior population, residents of all ages seek opportunities for meaningful intellectual engagement without needing to travel to larger urban centres.
Here is a small barrier with big consequences. If you cannot read the slides, you cannot follow the talk.
TOSH Talks brings artists, curators and historians into conversation with the public 8 to 12 times a year. Attendance keeps growing. But audience members, especially seniors and people with low vision, kept saying the same thing. They could not see it.
A $3,000 Community Fund grant funds a 75 inch 4K display, a video conferencing system for hybrid and recorded talks, and a whiteboard for facilitated discussion.
The same equipment serves the 400 plus students who come through the TOSH classroom each year.
The Old School House Arts Centre has built TOSH Talks into a genuine draw. Eight to twelve public lectures a year on art history, contemporary visual culture, curatorial practice, and Indigenous and feminist art histories. Attendance has grown steadily. Residents across Oceanside have made it clear they want thoughtful cultural learning close to home.
But there was a problem people kept naming. Slide visibility. Participants, particularly seniors and others with low vision, told staff informally during talks and in post event conversations that they simply could not read the projected material.
A $3,000 grant from the Community Fund goes toward the fix. A 75 inch 4K display screen, an Owl3 video conferencing system that enables hybrid participation and recording, a large porcelain whiteboard for facilitated discussion, and secure mounting hardware.
The reach goes well past the lecture series. The TOSH classroom serves approximately 400 students each year through art classes, workshops, youth programs and teen drop in sessions. The same equipment supports all of it, plus community education events like the grant writing workshop TOSH recently delivered in partnership with the Parksville-Qualicum Community Foundation.
Seniors are not only the audience for TOSH Talks. Through informal advisory conversations they help choose topics, and some serve as volunteer discussion facilitators.
TOSH receives no core operating support from any level of government, which makes capital upgrades like this one difficult to fund from an annual budget.
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