Former Nova Scotia orphanage renamed, repurposed as Black community hub
CBC
The building that once housed the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children in Dartmouth, N.S., is becoming a hub for the Black community.
The home that opened in 1921 was for many years the only orphanage in the province that would accept Black children.
It was initially seen as a significant achievement by Nova Scotia's Black community. But former residents started to come forward after it closed in the 1980s to say they suffered physical, psychological and sexual abuse over several decades.
That prompted class-action lawsuits, a formal apology in 2014 from then premier Stephen McNeil, and an eventual settlement worth $34 million.
The Nova Scotia Home For Colored Children then became the Akoma Family Centre, a registered charity that provides care for children with developmental and behavioural needs, while the old building on Wilfred Jackson Way sat vacant.
Still owned by Akoma Holdings Inc., the building has now been refurbished and is being renamed Kinney Place, after its first superintendent, James Alexander Ross Kinney, who was an advocate for educational institutions for Black children.
"The goal of Kinney Place is to be an incubator for Black business and an intergenerational hub for the community," Cheyenne Jones told CBC Radio's Information Morning Nova Scotia on Friday.
Jones, who is the assistant property manager at Akoma, said the grand opening of the building is taking place on Sunday.
It already has a few tenants, including a café and catering business, an anti-Black violence organization and a Black hair salon. It also holds a seniors' lounge, a studio space and the constituency office of MLA Angela Simmonds.
Jones said the building also comes with 130 hectares of land that will be used to "offer economic opportunities for African Nova Scotians in our community and the greater community."
The redevelopment of the site had been previously blocked due to zoning bylaws in the Halifax Regional Municipality, but council approved the rezoning of the site in the spring of 2021 after discussions with Akoma.
"All it took was for the people in positions of authority and power to understand the negative impact of decisions they had made years ago on the African Nova Scotian community," Irvine Carvery, the co-chair of the African Nova Scotian Road to Economic Prosperity Summit, said Friday.
"A simple change."
One of those opportunities is Akoma's plan to build eight affordable homes for the Black Nova Scotian community by 2023, funded by the federal government's Rapid Housing Initiative.
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