Bequests:
Leaving a social justice legacy

Many of us have made working for social justice a lifetime commitment. If you are thinking about leaving a legacy for social justice that will live on, you might want to consider leaving a bequest to support Connexions’ ongong work in your will.

If you’d like to discuss this option, please contact us:
Connexions Archive and Library
416-988-9586.

Sample text for leaving a bequest in your will:
“I bequeath to the Connexions Archive & Library, Toronto, ___% of the residue of my Estate to be applicable to the general purposes of the organization”
or
“I bequeath to the Connexions Archive & Library, Toronto, $___. to be applicable to the general purposes of the organization.”

Connexions’ Mandate

Connexions exists to support individuals and groups working for freedom and social justice. We work to maintain and make available a record of the theory and practice of people struggling against oppression and for social change. We believe that the more we know about the struggles, victories, and defeats of the past, and about those who took part in them, the better we will be to bring a new world into being.

Connexions maintains a physical archive of books and documents (The Connexions Archive), and is engaged in an ongoing project to build and expand an indexed digital archive of documents. We try to feature a wide variety of resources reflecting a diversity of viewpoints and approaches to social change within our overall mandate of support for democracy, civil liberties, freedom of expression, universal human rights, secularism, equality, economic justice, environmental responsibility, and the creation and preservation of community.

We are internationalist in our orientation, but as a Canadian-based project we feature an especially extensive collection of Canadian documents and profiles of Canadian activist organizations.

Connexions’ Statement of Values

We believe .....
1. In the value of preserving the history of grassroots movements for social justice and making it accessible to new generations.
2. In the importance of keeping alive the memories, experiences, strategies, successes, failures, and visions of those who have worked for social justice over the years so future generations can learn from them and be inspired by them.
3. In the tradition of ‘history from below’ –people's history – working to keep alive memories of resistance in the face of a political culture that insists there are no alternatives to the way things are, and that ‘resistance is futile’.
4. In the importance of diversity and pluralism, of recording and making available a wide range of approaches to social change and social justice. We aim, as best we can, to feature resources reflecting a variety of viewpoints and alternative approaches to social justice.
5. In the value of knowing our history, of knowing that people have been working at the grassroots for a better world for many decades and of learning about the problems they faced and how they tried to deal with them.
6. In the value of passing on the experience and knowledge of elders, and of people who have passed on, to the activists of today and tomorrow. These are threads of wisdom and experience that can be woven into the tapestries of our movements for change.
7. In the importance of sharing information as well as preserving it. Our goal is to make the contents of the archive available as widely as possible, in a variety of formats and languages.
8. In connecting people in different places. For people to act locally and think globally, it helps to know what people in other places are facing and how they are trying to bring about change.
9. In the values of democracy, civil liberties, freedom of speech, universal human rights, secularism, equality, economic justice, ecology, and the creation and preservation of community, which we seek to support through the Connexions Archive.

Contact

Call Connexions at 416-988-9586 or via the Contact page.