Reflections From Our Partners: Bonnie Nish
In 2023, Word Vancouver–Western Canada's largest free literary festival–invited SFU Public Square to collaborate on a kick-off event for their festival. With Guest Indigenous Curator Nathan Adler, the teams co-hosted Centering Indigenous Joy: A Celebration of Literature, Arts, and Creativity. Recently, we asked Bonnie Nish, Executive Director for Word Vancouver, about her experience partnering with our team.
Here's what she said:
In June 2023, we collaborated with SFU Public Square on Word Vancouver’s Guest Indigenous Curator’s special event Centering Indigenous Joy: A Celebration of Literature, Arts, and Creativity for National Indigenous People’s Day. This was a huge event and the vision of our guest curator Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler, with a night of readings, music, stories and comedy.
Putting on the event with SFU Public Square was a real team effort from beginning to end. Holding the event in their beautiful space at 312 Main allowed us to accommodate the over 150 people we had present throughout the evening.
Also, reaching out to their community brought a whole new audience to Word Vancouver that we would not have had access to ourselves. Families with young children, teens, friends and neigbours came out to enjoy the night. This included a newly arrived refugee family who decided to make this their first Canadian event for the entire family. We were thrilled to have met them and to watch their children's faces light up as they came to the food bar to get pizza.
Their staff is professional and easy to work with, allowing for each step of the process of putting on an event of this size to be seamless. Their technical staff’s expertise, along with other staff who were onsite for the event, added a degree of comfort knowing that any need we might have come up during the event would be covered.
Word Vancouver has launched their 2025 program!
