Behind the Scenes of LandMark: Uncovering Isorine Marc & Jamii

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LandMark was a month-long community engagement project that Exhibit Change ran in partnership with the St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood BIA.

Involving over 40 partnerships is make it a reality, one of the key elements of the project was the matching of our team of photographers with local organizations in order to highlight how these community projects are helping to make Toronto a great city to live in.

Our LandMark photographer Diana Nazareth interviewed her community partner Isorine Marc, who is the founder of Jamii, to uncover the story that would be translated into the photo essay for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.

Tell us about your mission? What was the inspiration for your idea/company/project?

In 2008, some of my neighbors and I came together to organize in The Esplanade neighborhood a few small but meaningful grassroots community activities throughout the summer days. Events ranged from outdoor barbecue to gardening, including bike clinics, movie nights and a mini arts festival. Within a couple of months, the change was obvious: after thirty years of living next to each other, neighbors started living with each other. This is the very core of Jamii’s inspiration.

I believe in one’s creativity; I believe in the power of arts to build our community stronger; I believe in people taking ownership of their public space; and I believe in the importance of nurturing a sense of pride of and belonging to the place where we live.

I founded Jamii in 2011. Jamii’s mandate is to enhance The Esplanade neighborhood’s vitality by initiating and producing arts-based community-engaged projects and events in and around Crombie Park.

The success of Jamii is not only in its vision, but also in the people and organizations that support it. The list is long, but it’s important for me to mention one of our greatest partner, CORPUS, the dance/theatre company I work for. It’s been a decade of taking arts to the street throughout the world. CORPUS has been supporting and partnering with Jamii – since the very beginning, to transform The esplanade with creativity.

The echoing of “change comes from within” resonates on The Esplanade. I’ve been living here since 2006, and I love my “village” – as I call it. The people I work with, engage with, partner with are my neighbors, friends, daughter’s friends, classmates, teachers (…). It ‘s not an outside force that comes in our homes to bring change: it’s us, Esplanadians, who create our tomorrow.

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How would you describe yourself in 10 words or less?

Passionate, engaged, happy, social, driven, enthusiast, hard-working, persevering, focused, generous and loving. That’s 11.

What is most sacred to you?

As of today: my 2-yrs old daughter. She needs my love and guidance.

Who or what is a current influential force in your life?

The excitement burning in me when thinking of what’s possible.
The discipline to see things through.

What was the hardest part of growing up for you?

I can’t think of any: all was happening to get me all set for what was coming. What I love is continue growing up and getting ready for what’s always ahead.

What advice can you offer to young women with GOOD ideas today?

Trust that you’re capable and don’t think about it twice: just do it.

Where will you be in 5 years? What will your ‘mission’ look like?

I don’t know where I will be, maybe here – maybe there; but I know it will be nice and I’ll feel good about myself, about my life.
I hope that The Esplanade neighborhood will be thriving and as creative as ever, under the leadership of Jamii; and if not under its leadership, I hope that Jamii’s legacy will be in the air, one way or the other.

Where can we find out more about your project?

www.jamiiesplanade.org

Behind the Scenes of LandMark: Tara Noelle & Young People’s Theatre

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LandMark was a month-long community engagement project that Exhibit Change ran in partnership with the St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood BIA.

Involving over 40 partnerships is make it a reality, one of the key elements of the project was the matching of our team of photographers with local organizations in order to highlight how these community projects are helping to make Toronto a great city to live in.

We interviewed Product Magazine photographer Tara Noelle about her experience in photographing the volunteers at Young People’s Theatre.

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What’s your background and why photography?

I am a local based portrait photographer who studied Fine Arts and Film Photography at OCADU. I stepped away from mix media art work to focus more solely on photography as a medium and career.

I enjoy that a great photo can suggest many emotions regardless of their subject, in a way suggesting everything while revealing nothing.  Why photography? I could be here forever… there are so many why’s, so why not?

Tell us about what inspired you after meeting up with your community partner?

Where to begin? While exploring the space, I was impressed by the quality of the in-house custom designers, and who could forget the story about how the large stage is supposedly haunted? However, what soon became clear to me was that the strength of Young People’s Theatre  is truly the young teenage volunteers who bring YPT to life.

 

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What was the concept that guided the creation of your Scotiabank Nuit Blanche photo essay?

I wanted to try convey as much as possible about the people behind the scenes of YPT in one photo but still keep my minimalist portrait style in mind.

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Connect with Tara: taranoelle.ca | Facebook: Tara Noelle Photography | Twitter:@taranoellephoto | Instagram: @taranoellephoto

We accept the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge!

Starting on July 29th, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has hit the social media world by storm and hasn’t stopped yet. Last night we were challenged by my lovely hubby Edmond Wong. Check out his video here. 

Like most people, you may have heard whispers of this ice bucket challenge filtering through the virtual grapevines and been wondering what the big deal was and what the heck is ALS?

ALS was first found in 1869 by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, but it wasn’t until 1939 that Lou Gehrig brought national and international attention to the disease. Ending the career of one of the most beloved baseball players of all time, the disease is still most closely associated with his name. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. (Source: ALS Association website)

The ALS Association launched this public awareness campaign and have been putting eyes and dollars in their pockets to further their fight to find a cure.

We accept the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge!

What we like about this challenge:

  • It’s about the people
  • A bias towards action
  • We can do more together than alone
  • A little risk can have a big impact

And for these reasons, we have chosen to challenge 3 friends that we think embody these values.

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We nominate:

1. Dr. Brett Jacobsen, Head of School at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School 

2. Jen Hanson, Executive Director of Connected in Motion 

3. David Kelley, Founder of IDEO 

Here’s our video!

You have 24 hours to respond!

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Lessons we learned from turning 5.

Happy Birthday to us!

5 years ago today, I had the bright idea of making a company called Exhibit Change. It was my way of bringing together design and community and being able to work at this intersection ever since has been supremely amazing!

Over the last 5 years, I have learned a thing or two and I thought I would share:

1. Collaboration is hard – it is no question that we can get more done with others than we can alone, we all know this. And there is a beautiful harmony to getting into the groove with another person or team and just making things happen. There is no denying that the vision grows and the idea spreads its wings to fly. Alas, we know it is hard. It is harder to bend to another person’s demands or to flex your mindset. That doesn’t mean you don’t keep trying.

2. Keeping challenging others – just like collaboration, challenging each other is what gets our growth mindset into gear. It is those moments where you know you should say something even though it is going to get you some death stares and unfriendly comments. It is challenge others and yourself that keeps you from letting the status quo wash over you.

3. Accept feedback – this is one of the hardest things to do. We are all really familiar with the nice thing-mean thing-nice thing feedback sandwich. We want to appreciate each other and the work we do, but all you ever remember is how the mean thing left you feeling. Giving feedback is difficult and accepting feedback makes you vulnerable.

4. Question everything – never assume, things are the way they are for a reason and just accept it. Asking questions, much like collaboration and challenging others is often thought of as an annoying habit of 5 year olds. Well guess what, we are 5!!! So we are going to keep asking why all day long.

These are the lessons that fuel our work and the last 5 years have been brilliant, who knows what will come next!

 

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Designing Toronto: Creating the Capacity to Convene

The evolution of Designing Toronto as an idea has come a long way since its first inception back in 2013. Originally envisioned as a weekend workshop about navigating the planning system, Howard Tam of ThinkFresh Group and Jennifer Chan of Exhibit Change brought together a community of people to try to figure out how to take this idea to action.

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Originally, the Designing Toronto team was focused on how we could support people to better navigate the planning and unplanning spaces, ultimately helping to get new community projects off the ground. What soon become obvious to the group was that part of the value of Designing Toronto was the ability to bring together some of the diverse and passionate players in the city-building community.

Opportunity in Failure.

As planning for Designing Toronto unfolded, we soon hit conceptual road blocks around whether or not our solution was solving a real problem and what resources we needed to see it through. Through research and conversations, there was no doubt about an interest in seeing more support for citizen-led projects. Our main question was whether or not pushing Designing Toronto to deliver a course on Toronto’s planning system would be the kind of support that citizen-led projects needed. Perhaps it is one part of a more holistic solution. Then there was the issue of generating a sustainable business model to deliver this new service.

Needless to say, our doubt and our collectively stretched resources were starting to wear at our enthusiasm.

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What we soon realized was that many other groups had been in this groan zone that our team had  suddenly found itself in. This realization would be a critical insight into the way forward – it was time for us to pivot instead of charging ahead.

To better understand this phase in the project development, we needed to learn from those who had already been here. We wanted to convene a group of projects that had jumped through and beyond this zone, we wanted to hear about the projects that has been consumed by failing to move beyond this point, and we wanted to speak with those teams that had just arrived with their fresh ideas.  Thus, the dezTO Hackathon was born.

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On March 29th, Designing Toronto convened a room of curious community-builders, planners and serial social entrepreneurs. The full-day event allowed us to hear war stories from the creative minds behind the now defunct Toronto Urban Exchange (TUX), to learn from the experience and expertise of ClearVillage, a London, UK-based nonprofit, to better understand the challenges facing Green Change, a Jane & Finch community space, and to meet the open government guru helping to incubate the Toronto Changes concept.

Since then, we’ve been working hard at digesting and synthesizing the harvest of ideas and actions that came out of the Designing Toronto hackathon. The creative brief on citizen-led projects in Toronto will outline case studies of ideas that had struggled plus highlighting the themes common between each of the citizen projects that were hosted during the dezTO hackathon. Pushing this creative brief into a call to action, we will outline what these projects need, and where you can help, to move these initiatives into their next iteration.

The creative brief will be out very shortly! So make sure to sign up for our newsletter to ensure you get a PDF copy when it comes out, hot off the presses.

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The Future of Camaraderie

As March came in faster than a speeding bullet, our time at the Situation Lab came to a close. After wishing Jeff Watson and Stuart Candy farewell, our search for our new home began in earnest. Not wanting to settle for just any place, we decided to embrace the Café Nomad lifestyle in the meantime. The good news? Nearly a month ago, we stopped being nomads and moved in with Camaraderie Coworking!

We are pretty excited to give up our nomadic ways. While working from home and coffee shops was productive, we knew it couldn’t hold up forever. There is just something about being able to create that boundary from work and life and not having to buy endless coffees to have a place to meet. And they really don’t like it when you want to do post-it note brainstorming.

We are now the Innovators-in-Residence at Camaraderie Coworking and will be starting a foresight project as we settle into our new home.

The framing for this project is based on the definition of Camaraderie: a feeling of good friendship among the people in a group.

Our proposal is to work on a project that we are calling “The Future of Camaraderie.” This project will develop 4 scenarios based on current trends in the co-working industry projected 25 years out into the future. We believe that this project will offer intellectual collateral tied to the work and vision of the co-working space. This project will also be a great way for us to engage with the members of Camaraderie in a foresight activity to help us better understanding the work culture of freelancers.

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We can guarantee that we will be sharing our process and learnings along the way.

We will be practicing using foresight as a tool and methodology to explore current trends and drivers of change, a process that is meant to provoke strategies. Foresight is not to be used as a predictive tool but more so to create reactions and conversation. It is an exploration of the plausible. Strategic foresight is a combination of participatory design, research and systems thinking. We will be using Jim Dator’s work on four generic futures as the framework for this foresight work.

Camaraderie Coworking itself is part of the larger co-working ecosystem in a variety of ways, as co-founder Rachel Young is a member of Coworking Toronto & Coworking Ontario. This gives us access to coworking conversations happening locally, regionally, provincially and systemically. Trends and conversations of how freelancers and small businesses are coming together is permeating the culture of coworking spaces and actively influence the way we see the workplace.

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Through this project we plan to research and explore the emerging trends that are effecting the way we work socially, technologically, ecologically, economically, and politically. Additionally looking back in history as to when we did similar activities to what we do now. At the end of this process we may end up with a shared vision document, strategies to support the uncertain future of coworking or any variety of services or products to prototype.

“The future” cannot be “predicted” because “the future” does not exist.” – Jim Dator

 

 

 

TUF Stuff: An Afternoon with the Toronto Urban Fellows

On March 20th Exhibit Change spent the afternoon engaging with a great network of passionate change makers and professionals who really do want to move the City of Toronto in a positive direction. This amazing group is none other than the Toronto Urban Fellows.

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The Toronto Urban Fellows is an innovative program that has engaged 58 professionals to date in an intensive training of what it takes to run Canada’s largest city with respect to governance, operations and administration.

Balancing full-time work and various seminars, we were honoured to be invited to meet with the group to explore at a high level the value of the design thinking process.

Delivering one of our rapid fire workshops, we helped the Fellows to scratch the surface of how to challenge assumptions and making space to focus on the problem definition phase. The workshop was intentionally structured to highlight the value of avoiding our natural tendency to jump into the solutions we already know before we truly understand the people who will end up using these services.

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The Toronto Urban Fellows demonstrated great energy and dove right into the workshop’s contents and concepts. It was an inspiring afternoon to say the least!

March Break Career Exploration: Rapid Fire DT4i

After last week’s 2-day DT4i training workshop, we dove right back into workshop mode with the amazing youth from Success Beyond Limits (SBL) last Wednesday. As part of SBL’s March Break Career Exploration, our DT4i rapid fire workshop sought to connect the topic of youth entrepreneurship with the benefits of the design-thinking process.

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Condensing two days of content into one afternoon, we weren’t sure what to expect as we moved 45 youth through the phases of the design-thinking process.

We really wanted to show the benefits of why teams should spend more time in the problem defining phase before moving into the problem solving phase. The key is understanding how best to use empathy in articulating your user needs, a true foundation for human-centred design.

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It would be an understatement to say that the youth from Success Beyond Limits showed no end to generating new ideas. We were also impressed with how easily the youth could craft unique and detailed “point of views” or POVS through their user experience maps.

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The ability to zone in on a specific user stood out in contrast to the other workshop earlier in the week. What we realized was the key difference between our two workshop groups was the youth’s ability to freely design for a specific user.

Professional experience, it seems, drives people towards designing one solution for everyone so no one is excluded. While this might sound logical at first glance, in the end these solution more often than not are solution that don’t work for anyone.

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Another impressive feat the SBL youth demonstrated was the lack of fear in focusing on the process versus focusing on the final product. Rather, the youth were quite comfortable to concentrate on the design tensions that revealed themselves from the crafted user POVs. The end result was a whole suite of very creative solutions that started off with exploring the design challenge of ice cream & social enterprise. Proposed projects included designing service robots for seniors, mobile app ideas, outlining ethical farming practices and developing a new approach to manufacture ice cream.

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What we learned from SBL’s freedom to focus on the process over the product is our need to highlight and push working professionals to give themselves permission to be uncomfortable and vulnerable in the design-thinking process.  The longer term advantage is the ability to creatively come up with new solutions to wicked problems. Otherwise, focusing on the product or “end goal” allows you to fall into the pattern of trying to solve new problems with the feasible solutions you already know.

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Back from Camp SXSWedu

At the beginning of March, I spoke at SXSWedu in Austin, Texas on “In The Trenches with K-12 Design Thinking” with Trey Boden, Dan Ryder and Alyssa Gallagher. Together, we  made a diverse panel speaking about the nitty gritty, down and dirty secrets of doing design thinking in schools.

In the short 1-hour panel, we talked about everything from getting started, the challenges of make time and space for design thinking, the value of light touch design thinking and developing a culture to support failing up. 

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Being a part of the panel, always re-inspires me for the work that we are doing and reminds me how lucky we are to be thinking through some seriously wicked problems. As the consultant on the panel, I am humbled to be asked to be a part of the conversation and to be valued for an outsider perspective. It is a welcomed position to be in from when I first started being involved in education conversations.

The best part of being on this panel was the chance to sit alongside Trey, Dan and Alyssa. This group came together from our Twitter Chat community, every Wednesday night at 9pm EST we get together on the hashtag #dtk12chat and talk about everything from design thinking in elementary school, focusing on the process rather than the product to education and social change. Every time I join in, I know I am bound to have a fruitful conversation and catch up with old and new friends.

For many of us, SXSWedu was our first face-to-face meeting with a group of people who we have been talking to for nearly 8 months. This week quickly turned into the foundation of friendships and community that I hadn’t anticipated. The greatest conversations were the ones that happened outside of the conference usually over a table of delicious Austin food. I realized that this is what it must feel like to go to Summer Camp. You never want to miss a moment of hanging out and yet your brain is drained from the stimulation. It was amazing knowing that at any moment at a conference of over 3000 people a friendly face was never too far away.

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Our community is built on a culture of “Yes, and”, challenging assumptions and nurturing one another to fail up. I think this fostered connections and welcomed unexpected conversations simply because it was built on a foundation of design thinking.

We welcomed others to join in our chaos at a DTk12 Live from SXSWedu chat experience. It was too much fun being part of the The Show aka Dan Ryder as Oprah at SXSWedu and I think the very nature of being in the same place with Trey and Dan on the show to close off our excitement is something I will always remember and cherish.

Check out our madness:

 

 

SxSW Edu: In the Trenches with K-12 Design Thinking

This week Jennifer Chan & Exhibit Change are in Austin, Texas for the 4-Day SxSWedu conference.

This is a jam-packed week filled with some of the most energetic and innovative leaders from all aspects of the education system in North America. This week we’re looking forward to making new connections, exploring potential collaborations, and pushing the conversation of how to bring positive change through design thinking to the way we teach and learn.

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Starting off the week strong, Jenn joined 3 other speakers yesterday on the panel “In the Trenches with K-12 Design Thinking.”  Not only was it a great conversation about learning through failure and the challenges and opportunities of using design thinking, it brought to life many of the great relationships that have formed through the weekly #dtk12chat conversations.

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Stay tuned for more updates from #SxSWedu as the week unfolds. Also follow Jennifer Chan on Twitter to see the action as it happens.