Conversations for Change interview

This last year in 2010 I learned of a book called High on Life edited by Nejeed Kassam and then later on I learned there was going to documentary called Conversations for Change. All of it seemed so wonderful, the basic concept-write a book and film a documentary around all kinds of different people that are out there making change. The age range for these changemakers? all ages-young and old.

I had the pleasure of meeting with some of the people from this project and I am continuing to be amazed as they continue to travel and edit and film and write.

A couple of days ago I was interviewed by the group and here was what I had to say: Interview with Conversations for Change



1) What inspired you to become involved in Social Change?

When I first started out I never even thought of my actions being referred to as social change. I only ever thought of the projects I was involved in as being fun and involving as many “cool” people as I could in and around the projects I was involved in. It was only after I had started, completed, and then started some new projects that I realized two things:

1. That I was actually having a ton of fun for myself and it seemed like the people around me were having fun

2. That we are actually making a difference in so many people’s lives.

This was perhaps one of the most powerful realizations that I had ever made in my life, along with the fact that I could actually make this sustainable by creating a really fun job out of it all. Once I started living and breathing in this sector it has been about the people all along, be it the people I work with, the people I work for, or the people I serve, all who inspire me. Every ounce of inspiration comes down to people. I would never have driven for 2 hours to give a 1.5 hour practice twice a week for over 5 years if I didn’t love the people I was doing it for. I wouldn’t have spent thousands of dollars and hours working on projects if I didn’t get to spend it working along side so many other hardworking and caring individuals.

So long story short, what inspires me, your everyday average Joe who cares, that is what/who inspires me.

2) What projects are you currently involved with?

Running Creativision keeps me pretty busy most of the days with everything from working with executives on creativity training, to helping university students figure out what the hell they want to do with their life, to helping companies creatively design their next brand, and everything in between.

However, there are two main things that are on the forefront of my radar these days. The first is a book I’m co-authoring with a good friend of mine, Collin Vine, called Career Chaos: What the hell are you going to do with your life? This book is interviewing literally hundreds of people all across Canada between the ages 4 and 98 asking how we figure life out? What we should do? Where we should go? If we could do it all over again what would we do? Would we change what we learned? How we learned? How would we deal with chaos? So far there have been so many amazing stories with so many surprise endings to many people’s stories.
The second major project that I’m working on is a combination of 2 things the first is a day for students to come together, get creative, and put out some useful products or services to the community. This day will be called “A Day of Play, Seriously!” This day will lead into a 5 week program in the summer where youth, ages 10-16 will be able to join for the first 4 weeks, again being challenged to solve some of our communities challenges in fun and creative ways. Then in the final week, perhaps the most fun week for me, the youth will be joined by a few adults to work on one final community challenge. The only catch, in this final week the youth will be the creative experts and will lead the adults as project managers through solving a community challenge.

To learn more, to follow along, and to find out how you can help with any of these projects come visit www.creativision.ca

3) What is, if you have one, the message that you would like others to hear? What can other inspiring young change-makers do in their communities to help enact social change?

My message is always about one thing, to have fun in life. Do the things in life that YOU want to do (believe me, many people will want to pull you in a million different ways, reflect and think about what you really want), make sure you can do it for a long time, do it with people who make you smile, and really give it (whatever “it” is) all you have. Come at the work you want to do from a million different angles (practice creativity, be creative). Finally always be willing to change the course, to learn something new, and be prepared to teach others, because believe me no one will think quite the same as you, so having all of those skills just mentioned will take you a long way in being a change-maker.

Change is really hard, but when it happens, man does it ever feel good!

Camps Over

Hi All,

So August and September were the months of camps. Always my busiest but also my favourite time of year. This year I met up with a new group that I had never heard of called M.Y. Camp (Motivated Youth Camp), what an amazing camp to find this year run by some of the best people ever! The founder of the camp Julien Braun McLeod and I sat down for a little bit before the camp and what was supposed to be at most a one hour meeting turned into several hours of discussion and laughter. Julien started the camp with a group of friends, all of whom are university students. This truly is a camp for youth run entirely by youth.

At M.Y. Camp I found the most extraordinary thing-youth who were really engaged in every part of the process. The youth have a lot of say on what goes on and love just about everything the does go on at the camp. It was interesting for me to walk around the camp and talk to many youth before it was time for me to spend a bit of time talking to them about passions and how to use them when navigating career chaos and deciding what they want to do for the rest of their life. It was interesting because they were all so polite and open and willing to chat about everything and anything. This group of youth were outgoing and just generally excited about life! In fact I laughed in my head when my time did start because as they were coming in I handed out a sheet of blank paper and almost every single person thanked me; none of the students knew what the paper was for but they all looked me in the eye and said thank you. To me this is just not something I was used to.

Presentation time rolled around and I had a lot of fun discussing personal branding and how that can lead to discovering the path that one wants to take in life. The campers even got to start on their new life maps which was a lot of fun.

Now from that leadership camps to athletic camps. This year I was involved once again in both Carleton U's hockey camp and Ottawa U's rugby camp. However, this year it was just a little bit more difficult in that they were both running at the same time; this meant much travel and changing of clothes between the two schools. This however is always fun for me to see the new young faces coming into camp trying their best. It was a trying two week process with many wonderful athletes coming out on both sides. I am also very excited for this new year to begin as both teams are looking very strong.

Ok so before this turns into a novel I will stop here. The bottom line is that I have once again found many many reasons for me to really enjoy the work I do. Youth in general always feed my energy. So thank you Camp season for rejuvenating me!

Ottawa is AWESOME

Two nights ago I had the pleasure of sitting around a table with some wonderful or should I say AWESOME people at the CodeFactory. These people have come together to do one thing: make and encourage Ottawa to be AWESOME.

The board of AWESOME Ottawa will be looking for people who have done and would like to do more things that are AWESOME. This means that each and every month they will be scouring the city to find people and asking others to do the same and submit the names of those who are really doing and thinking differently.

This board of 10 will each be putting in $100 of their own money each and every month to donate $1000 to someone in the city doing something AWESOME.

There will be more details to share as this program grows and I will definitely be sharing some of the project nominations on here and interviewing some of the winners and some of the runners up as this project progresses.

I am looking forward to some AWESOME experiences and meeting some AWESOME people along the way.

More AWESOMEness to come soon