CMU alumna carries family tradition into a new generation
Kaylene Blackwood (CMU ’26) receives the 2025 Mark & Dorothy Danzker Scholarship, recognizing her academic achievement, community involvement, and commitment to preserving cultural heritage.
Kaylene Blackwood (CMU '26) started playing the steel drums when she was five years old. There's video footage of her as a child performing in the Caribbean pavilion at Folklorama, Winnipeg's annual multicultural festival that celebrates diverse cultures through pavilions featuring food, live entertainment, and cultural exhibits. All you can see are her little feet standing on a stool, her arms barely reaching the instrument. Now at 26 years old, she is the leader of her ensemble and plays an integral role in the Caribbean pavilion both on and off the stage.
In addition to playing the steel drums, Blackwood has danced in the show, helped in the finance department, and served as junior ambassador for the pavilion in 2014. She even stepped in as band leader when the original leader developed dementia.
This academic year, she was a recipient of the 2025 Mark & Dorothy Danzker Scholarship, an award that supports students who demonstrate strong academic achievement, community involvement, and a commitment to preserving cultural heritage.
Blackwood's family has been a vital part of Folklorama for several generations, starting with her grandparents, who helped shape the Caribbean pavilion's early years, and carrying on to her parents and then to her generation.
Blackwood and her siblings also play the steel drums at schools and health care centres for events like Caribbean Heritage Month and Black History Month, and they performed with the Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir in their Christmas concert last year. "We've been getting more involved in that capacity... teaching about our culture, our instrument, why it's important to us, and how special it is," she said.
Family has been influential in her life in more ways than one. She looked to her aunt's career as an accountant and her grandfather's legacy as a math teacher and decided to follow in their footsteps by studying business.
Blackwood graduated from CMU this spring with a Bachelor of Business Administration (Co-op), a degree that interspersed courses with paid work-integrated learning opportunities, providing students with extensive practical industry experience alongside comprehensive classroom study.
She started out with very little experience or qualifications but earned internships at Cascades and Deloitte. "I thought, this is like a whole new language!" she said. "Then the more I got over the learning curves, the more I started to really enjoy doing the work. I enjoyed being able to see myself progress and then have that direct feedback."
It led Blackwood directly to securing a full-time job at Deloitte, one of the Big Four international accounting firms, right after graduating.
Each of her co-op work terms took place during a different phase of the accounting cycle, which she said was an invaluable tool for getting the big picture of what each section of a file entails and how a full year operates.
She brought these experiences to the classroom and utilized her studies to help her navigate workplace challenges. Courses like statistics and calculus got her excited about working with numbers and quantitative methods provided an essential foundation for everything she encountered.
The support she received from CMU faculty and staff was especially valuable: "My faculty advisor Craig Martin was a huge help. He helped me navigate where I should be looking for my co-op terms, what I needed to be focused on, and how I could organize my schedule to get the right working terms to match with my classes," she said. "Craig was super encouraging... It wasn't hard to get through with someone there to guide me."
Blackwood plans to work toward her Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) designation, her co-op placements having already given her a big head start on the 30 months of approved work experience that's required.
Before turning her attention to her CPA designation, Blackwood will return to a much more familiar stage. From August 9–15, she'll once again perform with her family at Folklorama's Caribbean Pavilion—the same place where, more than 20 years ago, she needed a stool just to reach the steel drums.