Spending some time with the FAST families...

We are excited to tell you about a recent match we've made with a t4change winner and a community program.

Mindy will be accompanying Renjie and Nick (co-organizers of the t4change initiative) to a family communication workshop called, The Families and Schools Together Program (FAST).

The FAST program is an innovative and collaborative prevention and parent involvement program for school-aged children 5-8 years old. Children and their families gather and participate in specific, fun, research-based activities designed to strengthen bonds within the family, school and community. Schools, parents and non-profit human service agencies come together to address and prevent major problems that have had a negative impact on families, such as:

  • Alcohol and substance abuse
  • Juvenile delinquency
  • School failure

The FAST program helps children succeed by creating safe and structured opportunities for voluntary involvement in repeated, positive, personal, interactive and communicative bonding experiences. These relationship-building interactions take place at many levels to ensure highly positive outcomes.

The program brings 10-15 families together for eight weekly sessions of carefully structured social activities. These activities include: designing a family flag, research-based family activities, Special Play time and parent networking.

The FAST Program is a locally-run, frontline, community development program that works directly with the families of Kitchener. A team of social workers, settlement workers, child and youth workers, nurses and community representatives come together to operate the program while forming strong relationships with the families that come to the program. Volunteers are very important to overall functioning of the program and ensure that the night's activities run smoothly.

Nick recently worked for the FAST Program as the Community Partner where he lead the diverse team through the 8 week program and onwards during the post FAST Works Program (an event that takes place once a month to keep the families connected).

"Working for the FAST Program was an amazing experience where I was able to work directly with families to strenghten and build communication and resiliency."

In an ongoing effort to boost the capacity of the program, Nick invited Renjie to join the team as a volunteer. Renjie immediately jumped into the program and can often be seen holding a new born singing sweet, soothing tunes. A year later, Renjie still refers to the program as "daddy practice". Renjie's girlfriend is forever grateful.

We are excited to be working with Mindy on this project that we are very close to. The families will benefit greatly with the warm presence of Mindy and, likewise, Mindy will hopefully find the experience to be very rewarding.

Filed under  //   FAST   children   communication   community development   families   frontline   schools  
Posted January 25, 2010 by Time for Change #t4change 
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And the Winners Are... (Part 1)

Shawn Yuan
Websites can cost NPOs a lot (usually ~$2,000), especially if they are just starting out. I want to help these organizations set up an elegant and fully functional website to convey their message to the World. The website would run on WordPress so that they can easily create posts to their blog and modify page contents.

Alfe Clemencio
I am a programmer and maker of motion graphics. I learned programming at the University of Waterloo and worked in an international Japanese company to create promotional movies. I work well with computer programmers and Marketing/Design teams.

Sunny To
Some of my skills and interests in new media (video editing, web programming) and program/project development. The social areas I am most interested in are the areas of human development education, reducing barriers to information.

Aditya Shah
I'd like to contribute my time and effort to an organization/charity/cause/person by leveraging my knowledge/skills/experience. Would also like to broaden my exposure to various social initiatives and meet and learn from similar minded folks.

Hamoon Ekhtiari
Hailing from Toronto, Hamoon is a founding director of the Millennium Network, a group of people who've started a conversation focused on Making Community Work More Effective, One Relationship at a Time.  Through his Time for Change experience, he hopes to learn from the dreams of other people and organizations while also sharing with them lessons learnt from his past involvements to help scale up the impact of their work.

Sean McArthur
I graduated with an engineering degree from McMaster University in April 2009 and currently work as an analyst for Deloitte’s Enterprise Risk Services. My greatest passions are music, travelling and nature. I love visiting new places and meeting new people. I have been very fortunate and owe it to the world to help those who have not received the same opportunities. One of things I would like to do through my volunteering is organize a concert to raise money for a local charity.

 

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Posted January 3, 2010 by Kristina Lugo 
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Time for Change (#t4change) at DigitalMediaCamp Toronto (#dmcamp)

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DigitalMediaCamp Toronto (#dmcamp) took place this past Saturday, where participants gathered in an attempt to address the question, 

"How can we work together to propel Toronto’s technology, content and design communities into the future and make Toronto a globally competitive hub of digital media entrepreneurship and innovation?"

Facilitated by  Mark Kuznicki, and supported by the Canadian Digital Media Network, some excellent conversation took place throughout the day around this question, with some concrete action items attached to specific timelines emerging at the end of the day. A number of blog posts have popped up following #dmcamp, providing an overview of the day's proceedings, including a blog post over at TechVibes by Karim Kanji. For a much more comprehensive listing of blog posts to do with #dmcamp, please visit dmcampto.slinkset.com

The day's events were captured in real-time, on the #dmcamp Toronto wiki, as well as on ScribbleLive, where any tweets or blog posts with the hashtag #dmcamp, were automatically fed into the ScribbleLive feed. It was almost disarming to find a picture of yourself projected on the wall in real time whilst engaged in a group discussion (look closely at picture 6 and 7 in the photo gallery above). It is interesting to see how social media is changing the way conferences and events are being communicated in real-time for those unable to attend, as well as documented for future reference.

#t4change at #dmcamp

Nick (@petten), Ruby (@rubyku) and myself (@renjie), took part in a conversation facilitated by Gabe Sawhney later in the day, where the topic revolved around connecting the technology industry with community organizations in order to create real change on the ground. Notes from this session can be found here. 

We brought up Time for Change, known as #t4change in #dmcamp-speak, and how this model is based on the original Timeraiser concept where we value time over monetary donations. We highlighted our pilot event on December 3rd as an existing 'action' item that we were already pursuing, and we acknowledged that we did not have all the answers as of yet, but were keenly interested in learning and adapting as the project unfolds. 

A lot of people seemed to take interest in this, judging from the quality of the conversation at #dmcamp, as well as the number of times the hashtag #t4change appeared alongside the hashtag #dmcamp on Twitter. We outlined that we were looking to redefine the terms 'volunteer' and 'service', and that we were focused in our efforts to engage young professionals working in the corporate sector, utilizing their professional skills and matching them with opportunities in the community best suited to their skills, interests and passions. 

Next steps for #t4change

One of the concrete action-items that emerged from #dmcamp was a commitment to host a roundtable discussion on #t4change at the Centre for Social Innovation sometime in early January 2010, with the help of Mark Kuznicki and Gabe Sawhney. Notes from this session can be found here. 

We invite all those interested, including those who attended Time for Change on December 3rd, as well as #dmcamp this past Saturday, December 12, to join us to discuss possible next steps forward with #t4change. We will be posting more information on our blog as well as on Twitter once we have finalized a date and time for the roundtable discussion at CSI.

For now, we are extremely excited for what lies ahead with this project, and will continue to learn and adapt as the project emerges. We want to make it clear that we would like to continue to be the holders of the process for #t4change, but we do not want to control the process. We want this emergence to be a product of co-creation, and we certainly welcome any input or critical feedback provided. As of now, we do not know if #t4change could spin-off into its own independent organizational structure, or become a project embedded into an already existing system infrastructure.

It is exciting for us to have people excited about #t4change. This project has certainly resonated with each one of us (myself, Nick, Ruby and Kristina) and perhaps this has to do with the much broader trend of young people in today's world, wanting to pursue their passions and create meaning in their lives.

Filed under  //   #dmcamp   #t4change   Digital Media   DigitalMediaCamp   DigitalMediaCamp Toronto   Time for Change   Toronto  
Posted December 15, 2009 by Time for Change #t4change 
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We did it!

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After many weeks of planning, we were finally able to bring our ideas to action. Last Thursday evening at Hotshots Gallery in downtown Toronto, brought together 12 photos, 4 local initiatives, 56 guests, 517 hours of winning bids and a hopeful ripple effect in the local community. The total number of hours bid by our guests that evening (including the 517 hours that will be matched by Kristina, Ruby, Nick and Renjie) amounted to 2246 hours. On a $20/hour wage, these 2246 hours represent over $44,000 in potential social capital should it be realized.

These numbers far exceeded anything we could have imagined - we thought we would get bids of 4-5 hours, but the average winning bid was 43 hours, with the highest winning bid being 91 hours (thank you Shawn Yuan)! Moreover, many individuals have come up to us and let us know that they would still love to be involved even though they did not win a photograph. We are so humbled and amazed by everyone's generosity.  And with that, we promise to connect with not only our winners, but anyone interested in engaging in the local community. 

In the coming weeks, we will begin conversations with our guests in hopes to match them with a volunteer experience uniquely catered to their skills sets and interests while we ourselves will be working closely as a team to also explore our own journey in matching those 517 winning hours. At the same time, we will be reaching out to local organizations and community initiatives to understand their challenges and skills in need. Updates and stories of the opportunities that our volunteers and ourselves are engaged in will continuously be provided on our blog, and of course, we’ll be keeping a running count of the hours we've banked so far.

This has been a great learning experience for us. We do not have all the answers at the moment, but we are willing to work together to do what we can in order to move things forward. If you have any questions/comments on the event, would like to us to try to identify opportunities for you to get involved in the local community, or simply would like to connect with us, we like discussions over coffee and sushi, so please feel free to contact us!

Photos have been posted on Flickr: and expect the video to come by the end of the week!

We'd like to specially acknowledge the following individuals for without them, this event would not have been possible:

Our speakers - Christine Ho (Well of Change), Kevin Wong (Charity Champs), Celina Agaton (Films that Move), Hamoon Ekhtiari (Millennium Network)
Our volunteers - Amanda Briganti, Janna Njauw, Michael Domingo
Our wonderful, amazing MCs - Renjie Butalid, Nick Petten

 
We will be in touch!

Ruby and Kristina
"Service is our rent for living on earth."

Filed under  //   #t4change   Time for Change   Toronto  
Posted December 7, 2009 by Ruby Ku 
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Cheers

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Thank you kindly to our sponsor, Steamwhistle =)

Filed under  //   #t4change   Time for Change  
Posted December 2, 2009 by Kristina Lugo 
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Featured Initiatives

With so many passionate people within our own networks, we will be showcasing the 3 friends and their local initiatives as samples of the types of organizations to get involved with. 

(1) Films That Move, Celina Agaton | @CelinaAgaton
Films that Move, is a free social change film series with the screening of Lemonade on Monday, December 7 from 6-8pm at George Brown. 

I created Films That Move to provide opportunities for cross-sector collaboration on community projects. The launch community focus is to help communications and web professionals volunteer or work on projects identified by non-profits. Films That Move hopes to provide a friendly space for people to get together, share ideas and collaborate on how to make our communities better. And Lemonade's theme on advertising and the recession seemed the perfect film to tie the event together.

There are also ways for the attendees to participate through a range of actions, ranging from the charity Lemonade stand, to voting which charity will receive the night's donations, to sustainable food donations and community partnerships. Visit http://filmsthatmove.org

(2) M-Network, Hamoon Ekhtiari | @silenthammer

More Effective Community Work. One Relationship at a Time.

We have great people with great intentions doing community work from coast to coast to coast.  We believe that we will all be far more effective at what we do if we collaborate rather than work in silos.

We are building the capacity and effectiveness of people and organizations by creating a culture where we ask the right questions when we Dream about the future, continously Learn from our journey towards it, and Share those lessons and stories with one another - simply put, we work to Dream. Learn. Share. systematically.

To create positive change in our local communities, you need both people with the right capacity to make well-informed decisions and the right tools and knowledge to help them do it effectively. Great people without the right tools and knowledge will not have optimal impact. Similarly, a collection of tools and knowledge will not be effective if it is not used by capable people. Dream. Learn. Share. is a recipe for change that connects the right people with the right tools.

(3) Well of Change, Christine Ho | @wellofchange

WELL OF CHANGE is a social change initiative creating a new breed of philanthropist. We match enthused volunteers with money making opportunities and then forward the proceeds to charity. We help you engage your employees through our employee engagement program to support the community and raise funds for charity. The Well of Change platform allows employees to provide services to other employees and people in the community, such as:

  • Teaching a language like Mandarin, Hindi, French
  • Instruct musical instrument like piano or guitar
  • Management consulting for a small business

·         Provide 1-hour career mentorship for new grads

  • Bookkeeping or tax services

Filed under  //   #t4change   Films that Move   M-Network   Time for Change   Well of Change  
Posted December 2, 2009 by Kristina Lugo 
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Not your Typical Auction

Time for Change is not your typical auction for a few reasons:

1. It is run by 2 unreasonable people. 
We challenge norms; value people, not profit; and believe that our small-scale efforts can one day affect large-scale change.
2. We want time please, not money.
Guests will bid on our photos with hours towards a local community organization/initiative and not with money. 
3. We want your maximum, not your minimum.
The auction will follow a blind bidding format. This means that our guests will not be able to see each other's bids on the photos, but will only be able to see how many people have bid on a photo. 

(: 

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

- George Bernard

 

 

Filed under  //   #t4change   Time for Change  
Posted December 1, 2009 by Kristina Lugo 
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Time For Change - December 3rd, 2009

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Part silent photo auction, part community involvement, and part celebration night out.

Kristina and Ruby are two recent grads who spent their summers after undergrad interning at 2 different NGO’s in Malawi and Botswana. They are both passionate about social change/media/innovation, photography, and are constantly striving for a better world. For our birthdays, we want to celebrate jointly and stray from the typical “go out and party”, and use this opportunity to bring people together and share our passions.

You are cordially invited to attend our Time for Change. Instead of raising money, we want to raise time. Each of us will be exhibiting photos from our respective experiences in Africa that our guests can bid on. However, instead of bidding with money, they will bid with community service hours for local non-profits.

Our Time for Change Objectives:

  • To thank all those who supported us financially and emotionally throughout the past year
  • To share our stories, encounters, gains and pains from the summer
  • To connect all those who want to be involved in the local community with meaningful volunteering opportunities that match their skills and fit their busy lifestyle.

Please join us at the Hotshots Gallery, 530pm-8pm on December 3rd, 2009. RSVP here.

We hope to see you there!

 

Ruby Ku | @rubyku | www.facebook.com/ruby.ku

Kristina Lugo | @kristinalugo | www.facebook.com/kristina.lugo

Filed under  //   #t4change   Africa   Botswana   Community   Hotshots Gallery   Malawi   Photos   Time   Time for Change   Toronto   Volunteer  
Posted November 30, 2009 by Renjie Butalid 
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