Among the many lessons we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, two resonated particularly strongly with the students, faculty, librarians, and staff who attended UTM’s reflection forums in May 2021. First, our physical place creates sincere attachments and connections irreplicable elsewhere. Second, our location and expertise provide a path to help this region flourish.
We put these lessons in practice—to cite two pandemic examples—in deepening relationships with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and in hosting the region’s first mass vaccine clinic for COVID-19. The first created new opportunities for learning and reciprocity, continuing to build trust and friendship with the people on whose home territory UTM works. The second helped decrease a burden from the public health and hospital system, administering more than 335,000 vaccine doses for a community that lost more days to lockdown than any other in Canada.
UTM will apply the same lessons over the longer term. Working alongside local partners, including immigrant and Indigenous communities and alumni, UTM will realize our outstanding capacity for regional leadership—and our duty to run a public institution for the public good. We discover, play, and learn in Peel because we want to power Peel’s success. And we celebrate our place within U of T’s tri-campus system, including our bonds with Toronto and Scarborough. They continue to expand our impact and support connections in research, teaching, and student, alumni, and civic engagement.
This local engagement helps extend a virtuous circle. Lots of our students live in Peel, Toronto, or Halton. Many faculty, staff, and librarians choose Mississauga as their home. Our international students enrol at UTM to join a leading international community—and they often remain in Peel after graduation, starting careers that benefit this region’s economy and society. So, we make this place—in Mississauga, Brampton, the Western GTA—a core our identity because we belong to communities we serve. And we celebrate our regional connections as the basis for a larger reach, proud that our international diversity and networks help lift up our ambition: to make a difference locally that drives change globally.
Commitments
- Incorporate Mississauga’s history, culture, and priorities into campus identity and planning.
- Support community-engaged learning, research, and service in our City and Peel Region.
- Ground UTM’s contribution to U of T’s global reputation in positive local impact.
Accountabilities
- Have we connected the campus’s past and future to those of Mississauga, Brampton, Peel and the western part of the Greater Toronto Area?
- Do members of the UTM community feel a sense of place-based belonging?
- Have we built partnerships between U of T and local communities— including other anchor institutions in Peel—to support health and wellbeing, social justice and Indigenous reconciliation, and entrepreneurship and environmental sustainability?
- Have we contributed to sustainable economic development and meaningful employment in our region, both for employees at UTM and beyond?
- Do our local initiatives and successes resonate across U of T’s tri-campus, in Canada, and globally?