When individuals walked into the Walnut Foundation’s Black History Month Symposium, they carried their aunties’ stories. Their grandmother’s silences. The weight of being African in a world that too often treats our bodies like problems to be managed instead of lives to be cherished.
The room at the William G. Davis Centre for Families in Brampton felt different. Warm. Intentional. Alive with purpose. This was a gathering about power, who gets to live well, age well, and be remembered whole.
When Dr. Olumide Adeguna spoke about brain health, it was a call to dignity. When Dr. Joyce Orokafor and Ngozi Iroanyah layered research with lived experience, the community reflected with accuracy and care. Asma Musa, Olu Muili, Jean Adeyemo, and Loretta Karikari named what so many of us feel but rarely get language for: that our minds carry both trauma and brilliance, survival and imagination.
Brain health isn’t neutral. It is shaped by housing, migration, racism, caregiving burdens, and the quiet grind of being strong for everyone else. It is shaped by whether a Caribbean senior can afford food that nourishes their body and spirit. By whether a Black mother gets taken seriously when she says, “Something isn’t right.” By whether we are allowed to rest without guilt.
The moderators: Akua Yirenkyi, Jahaan Thawer, and Shawn Gilpin made space for complexity instead of soundbites. They let the audience sit in discomfort. They let them ask real questions. They honoured the truth that healing is not optional.
We are tired of being framed as vulnerable. We are systemically constrained. There’s a difference. Vulnerability implies weakness. Constraint points to design. To policy. To power.
Yet, we are not powerless.
The Walnut Foundation understands this. They convene to shift consciousness. They bring together medicine and memory, data and dignity, science and soul.
This is why brain health is liberation work. It is about claiming our right to clarity, rest, joy, and longevity. It is about interrupting cycles that tell us our pain is normal and our wellness is extra.
The conversations had in that room were not the end. They were a beginning. A charge, because when Black communities gather to protect our minds, we are talking about freedom, and freedom starts in the mind.
