Canadian Tire Money

Anyone that lives in Canada, knows of (and maybe uses) Canadian Tire money. Alongside hockey and maple syrup, Canadian Tire Money is a classic Canadian tradition, that is a nationally recognized rewards program – yet I know few people that actually redeem their CTM for anything these days.

In fact, the inspiration for this post, was my acceptance of more CTM from a colleague, while knowing I will probably never actually use it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a day at Canadian Tire as much as the next person, but the same reason I have approximately 100 reusable canvas bags, I generally forget to bring my CTM with me.

It got me thinking… can you donate your Canadian Tire Money?

I was happy to find out that you can not only donate your Canadian Tire Money, but many local schools, hospitals, spca’s and other charitable organizations love receiving a wad of colourful Canadian Tire denominations. And while the connection between social services like animal shelters, schools and Canadian Tire is not immediately obvious, it exists. These initiatives and institutions can use Canadian Tire money for much needed supplies and services provided by CT.

So dip in to that stash of Canadian Tire Money, you know you’ll never use, and donate it to a local cause today. Simply perform a quick web search for “donate Canadian Tire Money” and discover which local organizations accept this kind of donation.

Other Rewards Programs with a Conscious:

Air Miles:

Many of us collect Air Miles but never use them. You can donate your Air Miles to a number of charities such as World Literacy of Canada and Kids Help Phone are two examples.

America Express:

The GivingExpress® program from American Express connects you to important causes including education, health, human services, and more. Redeem your rewards points to over 1 million charities world wide.

Shoppers Drug Mart:
Shoppers Drug Mart is pleased to announce that Shoppers Optimum Members^® will now have the opportunity to donate Shoppers Optimum Points^® to various organizations online. These points can be redeemed on behalf of the organization for discounts on purchases at Shoppers Drug Mart stores, according to the terms and conditions of the Shoppers Optimum Program^®

In truth, while videos and pictures are a great way of telling the Timeraiser story, you really do have to actually attend a Timeraiser in person to fully understand its impact.  It’s in chatting with an artist about the story behind his or her piece.  It’s hearing the passion in the voices of agency reps as they describe their programs or striking up a conversation with someone about what brought them to Timeraiser.  It’s watching anxious bidders during the silent auction and then hearing the jubilation when winners are announced.  But what eclipses everything is noticing your own excitement when you hear about a volunteer position that speaks to you and your interests.

But don’t take my word: read what other people have to say and more importantly: experience it for yourself!  The 2010 Timeraiser season starts Saturday March 20th in Toronto for the 7th year in a row.  Tickets are already more than 60% sold out, so giddy-up!  Following Toronto we have:

• 2nd Hamilton Timeraiser: Thursday April 22nd
• 1st London Timeraiser: Thursday May 13th
• 5th Calgary Timeraiser: Thursday June 17th
• 3rd Vancouver Timeraiser: Thursday September 23rd
• 2nd Edmonton Timeraiser: Saturday October 16th
• 3rd Ottawa Timeraiser: Saturday November 13th

So check out that video from the Ottawa Timeraiser and make a comment!  There are some great interviews including one from the evening’s emcee, CBC Radio Host Amanda Putz, our E.D. Anil Patel, and Ottawa artist Paul Sharp.

Happy viewing!

Postering Toronto

The Neighbourhood Day Strategy gives volunteers the opportunity to explore the city in which they live as well as give back to the community. The main objective of the day is to target 5 to 10 key neighbourhoods in the city where young professionals live, work, and shop to promote the Timeraiser.

This strategy goes beyond the typical flyer drop as we train our volunteers to communicate with local business owners and their employees about all the working parts of the Timeraiser in order for them to help us spread the word about the event. Every year we run this grassroots campaign about 3-4 weeks before the Timeraiser in order to engage store owners, managers and employees to empower more citizens to get involved directly to stimulate community development.

With a campaign in every city we hope to better understand how our city is promoting community development and to see first hand how local businesses are contributing to thriving communities.

Emily outside Kalendar, College Street

Next time you are in your local coffee shop look out for our Timeraiser flyers and posters and remember to buy your tickets today for the 7th Toronto Timeraiser.

You can view all the pictures from our Toronto Neighbourhood day here.

During our roundtable discussion, we talked through the idea of mobilizing people around a cause or issue – in this case using the Toronto 2010 municipal elections as the focus.  We discussed ways to engage the community and the barriers that might exist in doing so.  It was wonderful to sit around a table with different members of the community with unique perspectives and expertise.  Of course, that means in some cases an idea would bubble to the top and then quickly fall, but then, I enjoy a little healthy debate.

The four scenarios to discuss around “co-creating a toolkit for a self-organizing movement of engaged citizen led dialogue and action” were:

• Same time, same place
• Same time, different place
• Different time, same place
• Different time, different place

Our table was given the task of preparing a toolkit for mobilizing people together at the same time, but in a different place. Naturally, technology becomes the top discussion.  We discussed how best to use technology, language and access barriers, and anonymity versus identity.

As I’m sure you know, we are big fans of opening up our information and processes. I’m very excited that ChangeCamp follows the same ideals. You can follow our table’s conversation thread (and the conversations of the other 20+ tables) at this link.  I would also encourage you to review ChangeCamp’s official wrap-up and analysis of the event, here. We talked about inclusivity being a top priority, and also acknowledged that if we could increase civic engagement by even 20% in each ward, what a huge success it would be.

One thing I will take away from the second table I was at was the idea of “reclaiming the community center”.  In this discussion someone threw out the notion that we could rethink how the community centers are used, what our ideas of them are, and how we can better promote programs within a community center. It got me thinking.  I deeply value our local community centers – and there are also conversations happening in bars, coffee shops and on the TTC.  Are those conversations and social gatherings happening at community centers? Could community centers become the next hot spot? Should they?

It is something I’ll be thinking about as I continue to work with ChangeCamp and other agencies in our community.

I listened to a lot of Marvin growing up.

Rolling Stone magazine rank’s Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On as album of the year in 1971. Mercy, Mercy Me was one of the three #1 hits on the album.

Mercy, Mercy Me is as relevant today as it was +30 years ago. So to is the not-so-talked about mental illness that Marvin endured prior to his death.

Mood Disorders of Ontario and Canadian Mental Health Association researchers have documented that one in three Canadians will suffer from a mental health issue in their lifetime.

The loss of a loved one. A mid-life crisis. A work related episode.

Some cases more severe than others. Many simply requiring that people in need find help, just knowing that it is OK to talk about it without fear of stigmatism.

Issues of mental wellness is something that we want to actively promote as part of our Timeraiser and Civic Footprint programming.

On Saturday February 27th, Ballroom Blitz is organizing the Downtown Diva Dress Drive where they are hoping to collect over 1,000 dresses. So get out your cocktail dresses and formal gowns and give a girl the chance to be a princess for a night.

You can drop off your dresses on Saturday February 27th from 8am to 11am at any of the following locations:

Downtown Toronto: 155 Dalhousie Street M5B 2P7

Bloor West Village: 619 Windermere Avenue M6S 3L9

North Toronto: 1001 Roselawn Avenue #127 M6B 4M4

Mississauga: 1091 Atwater Ave L5M 1M8 (Dixie/QEW)

Thornhill: 52 Schuster Lane l4J 8Y7

Oakville: 527 Tipperton Cres (Bronte)

Oakville: 2139 Rosemount Crescent (3rd Line & Upper Middle)

Brampton: 297 Rutherford Road South L6W 3R5 (Steeles/410)

Burlington: 5203 Lakeshore Rd, L7L 1C7

The Beach: 143 Sears St, M4L 1B4 (Queen & Greenwood)

Here are a few things to consider before dropping off any dresses:

• Dresses MUST be current/modern style.
• Dresses MUST be clean and on hangers.
• Dresses MUST be prom dresses, formal gowns, or fancy party dresses.

Accessories MUST be stylish, clean, and in excellent condition.

For more information check out Downtown Diva Dress Drive on Facebook. Let’s make this Cinderella story a reality!

For those who are unfamiliar with it, TED, or Technology Entertainment Design, is a non-profit organization that spreads good ideas through conferences, their video site and the annual TED prize, given to individuals with “One Wish to Change the World.” The TED talks, featured on the site, are given by individuals ranging from entertainers to artists to scientists to professionals and to anybody else with a creative idea.

Two talks with very different approaches have stuck out in my mind: Bill Davenhall’s Your Health Depends on Where You Live and Ze Frank’s Nerdcore Comedy. Davenhall, the head of health & human services marketing at ESRI, talks about the novel field of ‘geomedicine’ and its nonexistence in health care services. Using GIS to map heart attack rates and toxic release sites in the United States, Davenhall’s map allows users to track their place history (places they have lived) in the United States to get a grip on the effect their environment has had on them. You can look at it as a grim picture, or as a move toward a more comprehensive health care approach that takes ‘geomedicine’ into account.

The second talk, given by internet personality, entertainer and public speaker Ze Frank, is a light-hearted talk about tech joys and the numerous ‘web toys’ Frank has created to increase the amount of social capital on the web. His creations have inspired people to come together and create (anything) themselves and in collaboration with other each otherAs such he’s been featured in numerous media and is currently working with Time Magazine.

At Timeraiser, we’ve been talking a lot about open data/architecture and how to harness and display it using web-based interactive mapping. I think these two talks hold a lot of lessons for this type of work. Davenhall’s US health example puts the power of interactive web mapping on display. Simply type in one or more locations and investigate your past and present local environments. Frank’s talk highlights the benefits interactivity has for creative and innovative thought, and for increasing a community’s – a civic environment’s – social capital.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been mapping various non-profit organizations using open data. This week I’ll be sitting down with Emily to discuss how we can bring these into the public sphere in an interactive and creative way. Hopefully we can maximize the amount of information available in a user’s environment while providing a platform for the creation of capital.

In it, Kaori Furue describes a tour of the new location at Metro Hall, complete with details about a new Cafe opening today, as well as a description of the 10 additional student spaces created out of funding from the Boston Pizza Foundation.  Here is another good example of a Social Enterprise in Toronto. At the Cafe, students will prepare cold and hot items to be sold during breakfast / lunch, with “proceeds going back into the program to cover operating costs, supplies and rent”. As someone who loves all things food related, the culinary tie-in is close to my heart.

The Basic Culinary Skills Program is a 12-week program for people who receive social assistance. Once completed, students receive a Communication Food Handlers Certification, as well as 344 hours of hands-on kitchen training.

Our neighbourhood YMCA at Yonge and Grosvenor

The program, and its new location, is a great example of a community-based win-win-win program (like Timeraiser!). Students learn essential culinary skills, equipping them with quality job training, the downtown core gains a new foodie spot with a cause, and employers have a larger pool of qualified graduates from which to hire from.

I can’t wait to head down and check out the Cafe (slated to open today!), and will be sure to upload pictures to our Civic Footprint Twitter feed when I do.

Here is what I like about Freeman’s character: Episode after episode, you will see Freeman patiently peering under a magnifying glass with his wood working tools creating some little toy while waiting for the bad guys to make a call and activate the ‘wire tap’.

It was boring work. But it was critical to make the case.

His other colleagues were often out on the street, cracking heads and making arrests. Freeman was assigned to the tedious grunt work.

Freeman also spent a lot of time searching for patterns in loosely organized pieces of crime reports, maps, the banking statements of criminals, suspect photos and property development information.

In several episodes you would see him sitting there, silently, looking at the collage on the wall. He’d sit there, hour after hour, day after day waiting for the pattern to emerge. This method Freeman’s colleagues to no end: they wanted immediate results.

However after time, patterns would emerge. The gangsters operated more sophisticatedly than the police gave them credit for. Their techniques more thought out than police suspected. And unsuspecting accomplices were keeping their exploits hidden.

In our offices, we also like to look at a lot of seemingly random data, stats and stories. We, like Freeman, often post them on a board or wall or into a GChat. Often it is a bunch of random stuff about the nonprofit sector. Sometimes it’s simply “Hey have you seen this?”. In doing so, we see a few patterns emerge. We’ll be blogging about a few of these patterns in the next few weeks, but the one that is most promising is the open-data/open-architecture movement.

We think there is massive opportunities in our space. We’re also happy to see more buzz around Social Enterprise and will be connecting the docs on seemingly random stories that relate to both areas.

Feel free to share your observations with us; collecting information from all sources is the best way to solve a case.

Under Mike’s supervision, over three dozen students put together a talent show in support of Mia Kirshner’s charity ‘I Live Here‘.

Two acts. Two dozen performances. In between each performance the house band Hard Fix kept the crowd entertained.

With over a dozen plays under his belt, Mike is one of the many teachers in the GTA helping kids first find, then fine tune, their inner-actors. One of the musical acts that evening was Lawrence Park alum Perion Ross, who has produced three albums.

Now back to Mike. I am really proud of him. He works off a shoe string budget, in a seriously worn out theater. The paint is chipping off the ceiling, stage and lighting equipment is twice the age of the students.

He has grown the interest in drama, theatre and the arts program from just a couple students when he took the helm of the program, to over 70+ kids who auditioned last year.

Toronto is in the middle of its modern arts renaissance. With massive arts events like Luminato and Nuite Blanche, or programming via Soul Pepper Theatre and Distillery District, or capacity builders like ArtScape, good things are happening in Hogtown.

In less than a week, we will begin ticket sales for the 7th Toronto Timeraiser at the Distillery District. Stay tuned.