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!

Small Towns and my trip to the Eastern Townships

On November 21st 2009 I had the privilege of travelling to the Eastern Townships where I got the chance to meet and work with a group of young people looking to make a difference. I spent a little over an hour with them talking about what is in their community now and how they can move forward in their communities. We brainstormed ideas of things that could be going on and how they could make a difference. Many times I was found challenging them on their ideas and making them think broader and bigger.

It was an interesting trip because as much energy and excitement and ideas the youth had, I realized they still all had so many "barriers" in their heads. I write barriers with parentheses because to me they were fictional barriers. These barriers were things the youth had made up saying that people didn't come to their towns, that their towns were boring, but yet they had just worked with someone else telling them all the things they were going to do-adventure parks, huge games across community borders of treasure hunts, etc...I pointed out to them that if they held the attitudes they did that none of those things would ever come to fruition because the first time they ran up against a challenge they would quite and say "well that is the way the town runs, and no one ever listens to us" If they were going to change other peoples mindsets about their towns then they were going to have to change their own mindsets about their towns.

I found this a great day as I to grew up in a small town called Shawville, Quebec and I too once said Shawville is so boring and there is nothing to do here. No movie theatre, no Tim Horton's, no anything. Coming from a small town we are always looking for more-a mall, a place to watch movies, a bigger grocery stores, a Tim Horton's for goodness sakes that is so unCanadian to not have a Timmy's. But, what people don't realize is that there are amazing things that happen, little things that happen no where else. Movie theatre, who needs a movie theatre-we set up a screen and a projector in our park and the community comes out to watch. Hockey is our mall-that is where all the kids come to hang out and talk-and sometimes they might even know what the score of the game is. The point is small towns have lots to offer and people need to start to realize that the only limitations we have when living and working in a small town is our imagination. Look around there is tons of space and usually tons of people who are willing to help if you ask, mind you, you might have to ask more than once.

Check out more about the Eastern Townships at http://www.townshippers.qc.ca/

TEDx YouthOttawa

the date: March 4th, 2010 the location: Ashbury College in Ottawa Ontario the hosts: FYBY News

What a wonderful event this was. I was lucky enough to be one of the presenters at this great event. I spoke about Career Chaos and how students in this new age should start to think about how they navigate the educational and work systems.

This is a very intriguing conversation-one that I definitely love talking about but this post is about the others. The others being anyone and everyone else in the theatre.

The audience was astounding their faces of excitement as speakers and entertainers only got me more excited. I love being a crowd where people want to be a part of the crowd. People were there because they knew what TED was all about and they knew that they would find inspiration and they were not let down. I had the chance to meet some of the audience members and the audience I found was just as varied as the speakers. One lady had started her own company and was there with her daughter finding inspiration to move on. Another fellow was there representing Minto. Not to mention there were tons of students there looking to be inspired.

Now the speakers-what a bunch. Everyone from high school students performing plays, to university students talking about brains and neurology, to a fabulous presenter who convinced the audience that there is no such thing as garbage.

To find out more and to watch the videos (not quite posted yet) check out www.tedxyouthottawa.org