DANNA HORWOOD

FOUNDER

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Danna Horwood is the founder of Margaret’s Legacy, an educational initiative dedicated to Holocaust and antisemitism education through storytelling, values-based learning, and community engagement. What began as a personal project to help her children understand their grandparents’ story evolved into a widely used documentary and educational resource, reaching schools, educators, and community organizations across North America and beyond.

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Margaret’s Legacy has evolved over the years and has taken on a life of its own thanks to the involvement of the Hamilton Jewish Federation. With the establishment of the Margaret's Legacy Holocaust Learning and Jewish Advocacy Centre, and Margaret’s Legacy’s educators taking over most of the Holocaust related presentations, Danna has had the opportunity to shift her personal focus toward an expansion of Margaret’s Legacy’s mission that has been her dream for a long time. 

Danna’s vision for the next chapter of Margaret’s Legacy includes themes of intergenerational trauma, resilience, and identity, reflecting a growing commitment to integrating research, lived experience, and Jewish values into meaningful educational frameworks.

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Deeply involved in her community, Danna has spent years volunteering in educational and advocacy spaces, supporting organizations and programming that strengthens Jewish identity, fosters dialogue, and builds emotional awareness across generations. Danna supports women navigating emotional overwhelm, postpartum challenges, and life transitions, offering grounded, nonclinical guidance rooted in empathy and shared experience. She has a unique gift of connecting one on one and has sat with dozens of women in hospitals, coffee shops, women’s shelters and living rooms, listening, comforting, guiding, and helping them name the storms inside them. 

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Her debut memoir, My Dearest Children, is structured as a series of intimate letters to her children. Blending personal narrative with evidence-based insights, it explores motherhood, Jewish identity, trauma, resilience, grief, and the often-unspoken emotional inheritance passed through families. Drawing from five generations of family history, including the legacy of her grandparents, Margaret and Arthur Weisz a”h, both Holocaust survivors, Danna writes with striking emotional honesty about the patterns we inherit and the ones we choose to transform.

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Danna writes not as a clinician, but as someone who has lived the work she describes, healing from postpartum and seasonal depression, navigating profound loss, and learning to break intergenerational patterns with compassion and intention.

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Her work centers on one core belief: that the stories we tell have the power to shape and strengthen generations.