The Kitchen Table: Diasporic Tensions, Historical Truths, and Hard Conversations
Welcome to another bold, unfiltered conversation with Augy Jones and Vanessa Smithers about the tensions that live across the diaspora, the histories that shape them, and what it means to stay in the room when the conversations get a little uncomfortable.
In many African Nova Scotian households, the kitchen table has never just been a table. It's where folks gather without ceremony.
Where stories are told and retold.
Where the truth comes out sideways and straight on.
Where somebody laughs, somebody gets checked, somebody remembers, and somebody leaves with more to think about than they expected.
I know you know the ones.
It's where community is made, strained, repaired, and reimagined in real time.
The Kitchen Table is an ongoing conversation series rooted in that spirit.
Not a polished performance with goals to "fix everything," a panel built on distance, or a conversation designed to protect anyone’s comfort at the expense of respectful honesty.
This is a space for real dialogue.
The kind that asks more of us & leaves room for complexity, contradiction, and care.
For this conversation, Augy and Vanessa will be chatting about the tensions that can surface across the diaspora, not only in Nova Scotia or Canada, but internationally.
They’ll be naming the misunderstandings, inherited wounds, assumptions, and fractures that can shape how Black folks experience one another across geography, migration, ancestry, language, and power. They’ll also be asking what it takes to stay in the conversation anyway.
What do we do with historical truths that make people defensive? How do we hold difference without collapsing into erasure? What does solidarity ask of us when our histories are connected, but not identical?
This is a live, real-time dialogue between two people who work at the intersection of people, systems, and story, inviting you to listen in, reflect, and ask questions.
About the hosts:
Augy Jones is a relational leadership consultant, educator, and former Executive Director of African Nova Scotian Affairs with the Government of Nova Scotia. Over more than three decades, he has led across classrooms, gymnasiums, campuses, and government departments. In each setting, he has been asked to lead complex conversations about race, equity, leadership, and change in ways that are clear, grounded, and usable for the people in the room. Through keynotes, his Inclusive Culture Mindset Tool Box, multi-day workshops, and advisory work, he supports organizations, unions, schools, and teams in moving from performative diversity language to relational leadership and accountable practice. His work focuses on building practical mindset tools that leaders, teams, and communities can use to navigate tension, rebuild trust, and move toward more human-centered cultures.
Learn more about his work at augyjones.com and connect with him on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Vanessa Smithers is a Toronto-based, African Nova Scotian writer, narrative consultant, legacy archivist, and speaker whose work lives at the intersection of story, identity, and inheritance. Rooted in ancestral ties to The Hill, a historically Black community in Truro, Nova Scotia, she helps individuals, organizations, and communities name their stories with more authenticity, depth, and care. She has supported over 3,200 people internationally, from grassroots builders to institutions such as Apple, Spotify, Netflix, Salesforce, VaynerMedia, and the Government of Canada. Vanessa believes generational wealth and legacy live in language passed down, memory protected, and stories preserved in our own words.
Learn more about her work at vanessasmithers.com, and connect with her on Instagram and LinkedIn.
This live session is open to everyone, whether you are joining from Nova Scotia, elsewhere in Canada, or anywhere else in the world.
If this topic lives close to your spirit, family, work, or history, there's a place for you at the kitchen table.
See you soon!