Purpose & Vision
Some things grow even where the ground was never meant to hold them. Black Impact exists to make McGill that kind of ground — a place where Black students, faculty, and staff are rooted in who they are, equipped to meet global challenges, and free to thrive. Our work is to turn moments of progress into a lasting ecosystem of Black scholarship, community, and care: not a program to be maintained, but a self-sustaining part of this institution.
Mission
Our mission is to cultivate a sustainable environment where McGill's current and future Black community can innovate with intellectual freedom and ease. Here, Black scholars are valued for the knowledge they produce — not only the experience they're asked to recount.
Our Calls to Action
We are here to root our community in a strong sense of self.
We are here to unite Black scholarly communities across McGill and beyond.
We are here to uplift and broadcast Black research and innovation.
We are here to foreground Black existence and inquiry in the life of the university.
We are here to connect our community and secure the ground beneath it —
so that, together, we build a more rooted and sustainable future.
Strategic Orientation
Knowledge as liberation. We treat knowledge as both armour and freedom — claiming the curricula and spaces that have too often felt alienating.
Access without gatekeeping. We strive to create unequivocal access to the opportunities and resources that support our community's academic journeys.
Action-driven. We hold ourselves to concrete, sustained, and targeted action. We gather evidence to bend the arc toward tangible progress.
Built to last. We turn programs into durable institutional systems, learning from those who came before us and building on their efforts and rich experiences.
Grounding words- Barbara Althea Jones
Barbara Althea Jones (1936–1969) was a Trinidadian-born geneticist, poet, and activist who taught in McGill's Department of Genetics in the late 1960s — the first woman from the Caribbean to earn a PhD in plant genetics. She called herself “a geneticist by vocation, a poet by avocation,” and was an outspoken voice against anti-Black racism at McGill and across Montreal, naming the university's own ties to slavery from the lecture hall. She died in 1969, at just 32. We give her the last word.
Her portrait: McGill Poetry Matters
— Barbara Althea Jones, “Academia,” Among the Potatoes (1967)
