Civic Footprint Blog

A Real Cinderella Story

Feb 16th, 2010

dgx5fjg5_44f6krtmgt_b Prom is a one of those momentous events in high school that you never forget. It’s a right of passage for every teenage girl to find the perfect dress and act out the Cinderella story for one special night. One organization is turning the fairytale Cinderella into a reality for many young girls in the city. Ballroom Blitz is a 100% volunteer run organization that promotes self-confidence and individual beauty by providing free prom dresses and accessories to graduating grade 12 high school girls who cannot otherwise afford them.

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!

Posted in: Civic Footprint.
Tagged: Downtown Diva Dress Drive

Learning From Ideas

Feb 12th, 2010

by Mike Dror.

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I’ve been watching a lot of TED talks lately.

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.

Posted in: Civic Footprint, In the News.
Tagged: TED

Step Aside, Jamie Oliver

Feb 10th, 2010

by Amanda Grainger.

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Sure, Jamie has Fifteen, but Toronto has the YMCA. The Culinary Skills Training Program at the YMCA sounds pretty fantastic, and some of the pictures from this article are drool-inducing. The Torontoist recently featured a story on the Basic Culinary Skills Training program.

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.

Posted in: Civic Footprint.
Tagged: YMCA

HBO’s The Wire: Great Writing, Amazing Character Development

Feb 8th, 2010

by Anil Patel.

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Eli Malinsky (Centre for Social Innovation) and I had coffee recently. Before we got down to business, we started talking about our favourite television shows. We quickly found out that we both appreciate HBO’s the Wire. Omar is Eli’s favourite character. Freeman is mine.

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.

Posted in: Organizational Pilates.

I Live Here: Lawrence Park Collegiate and Mia Kirshner

Feb 5th, 2010

by Anil Patel.

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His students know him as Mr Laidlaw. I know him as Mike. Mike Laidlaw is a good friend from highschool. He’s always been passionate about theatre and the arts. Mike followed that passion through university, where he majored in drama, and is now the head of the Drama Department of Lawrence Park Collegiate in North Toronto.

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.