City hall symposium aimed at engaging black, newcomer communities

June Girvan, an elder in Ottawa’s black community, opened a symposium Wednesday by blowing a special African horn, filling the atrium of Ottawa City Hall with a muffled sound not unlike that of a harmonica.
The Jamaican-Canadian was issuing, she explained to the audience, a call to action — a call for the community to “come together to act in the best interest of the whole.”
It was in that spirit that about 40 people spent the day discussing how members of the black and n