Alain Latour

Baby, helped by Gallery Grill manager Jerry Horton, will load up her car with enough soup for 400, maybe 500 people. She and the other celebrity chefs will spend several hours pouring soup into beautiful ceramic bowls made by Ontario-based potters. The potters donate more than 400 bowls to the event, the chefs donate their time and recipes, and guests contribute $55 a ticket to sample the soups and take home their chosen bowl at the end of the evening. All proceeds go to Anishnawbe Health Toronto, a culture-based Indigenous centre that works with those who seek to escape homelessness.

“It takes place in a beautiful space, right where Jamie [Kennedy] used to have his restaurant. It’s a great vibe and the bowls are gorgeous. I love Empty Bowls and what it does for the city’s homeless,” says Baby.

Jamie Kennedy invited Baby to participate over 20 years ago.

“He sent me an email and said, ‘would you like to be involved?’ And I said, ‘absolutely.’ He was instrumental in starting the whole thing. It’s a great opportunity to give back and it’s really rewarding to be able to support and use your position as a chef to help out.”

Siobhan Boyd, senior manager, education & adjunct curator, Gardiner Museum, praised Baby’s involvement.

“Empty Bowls is now in its 24th year and Chef Baby has been involved almost from the very beginning. Every year when I place the call to chefs to participate, Chef Baby is one of the first to respond. She has served some wonderful soups over the years!”

Baby appreciates being given carte blanche. “As long as it’s soup,” she says, “I can cook whatever I please. We also have great local produce this time of the year that I can use.”

“It’s fun for us, too, to be honest. Once you get the logistics out of the way and you’re set up, it’s nice to be able to socialize with other chefs. Some of them I only see at this event once a year. We try each other’s soups, and the spirit is great,” she says.

Find out more about Empty Bowls.

U of T students celebrate Toronto 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games

sgupta — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 10:01:39 +0000

U of T students celebrate Toronto 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games sgupta Mon, 03/30/2015 - 06:01

Cutline

Aerospace major and Bikechain volunteer Adrian Esser is one of the students working on creative ways to support and celebrate the Games (all photos courtesy Hart House)

Alain Latour

Author legacy

Alain Latour

In only a few months, Toronto will come alive with the Toronto 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games. Meet two students who hope to leave a mark, not just on the Pan Am Games themselves, but also on the lives of some of the people who will soon join us in our city.

Adrian Esser

When he’s not hard at work studying aerospace, Esser volunteers for Bikechain, a not-for-profit cycling organization based out of St. George campus. His idea for the Pan Ams was born in a surprising place – a bar in Little Italy.

“I’m not a huge sport fan, but this one time during the FIFA World Cup, I went [there] with some friends and I watched the match and the energy was just amazing.”

Knowing that international visitors and students won’t be able to navigate the city as easily as a Toronto native such as himself, Esser realized he’d like to bring this experience to them, especially to those who won’t necessarily buy tickets but still wish to enjoy an event on TV.

The end result? A project to have a Bikechain pop-up stand at the CIE so that volunteers can provide DIY repair service to members of the international community.

More to the point, these volunteers will also help visitors learn about ways to experience the Pan Am Games. And in a clever twist of a common Bikechain practice, they will hand out colour-coded name tags to differentiate attendees based on sports they want to follow at the Games.

“The [names tags] will act as a conversation starter,” says Esser. “We can also foreseeably email people who choose to go on mailing lists about sports events that match what they wrote on the name tag. That way, they could then go with other people to watch a cycling event at a bar.”

Esser and his project were awarded $500, which he says has been allocated to food, promotion, parts, and more.

Eleni Vlahiotis

A ��Ƶ OISE teacher candidate, with a B. Ed. and a B. Phys. Ed., Vlahiotis is passionate about education.

Vlahiotis is also an Equity Initiatives Student Leader for Equity Movement, an organization through which she ran an event called She Talks on February 24. It’s for this event that the Pan Am/Parapan Am Student Initiative Fund awarded Vlahiotis $1,300.

“It was actually my second time doing this event,” says Vlahiotis “It was created last year and it was very successful, so of course I wanted to bring it back.”

A multi-partner initiative hosted by the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education as part of the Ignite program, She Talks addressed sexuality issues and other topics related to women and gender leading up to the Games.

“Specifically, She Talks was born because of the poor representation of women in sports in general and high performance sports in particular,” says Vlahiotis, who used to play fast-pitch softball.

“The funds covered the entire event, so I’m very grateful. And even if I hadn’t received the money, the application process made me lay out my objectives and plan everything more carefully, so it was very helpful for me.”

(Read more about She Talks.)

The ��Ƶ 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Student Initiative Fund is a one-time fund for student groups planning events and activities that relate to, or celebrate, the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games. This fund is a tri-campus partnership between standing student initiative funds at the ��Ƶ. (Find out more.)

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Three steps to building your career: tips from a former Olympian

sgupta — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 09:20:09 +0000

Three steps to building your career: tips from a former Olympian sgupta Tue, 02/25/2014 - 04:20

Alain Latour

Author legacy

Alain Latour

Subheadline

Professor Bruce Kidd, Hart House Warden shares tips for students

In today’s competitive economy, recent graduates may be tempted to settle for the first job that comes their way. But are they making a mistake?

In a weekly blog series from Hart House, Professor Bruce Kidd, former Olympian and the warden of Hart House, recently shared tips on how to build a career that’s more deliberate than desperate.

Three Steps To A Great Career

If you’re graduating soon, you’re probably eager to get started on your professional path. Maybe you’re concerned about looming student loan payments. Maybe you want to prove that it was worthwhile to invest all this effort and time and money into U of T.

But if you can afford to be patient – if you can take the time to develop the right strategy – you will be rewarded in the long term. After all, great careers are more akin to a marathon than a frantic sprint. Run too fast, and you’re more likely to end up in a dead end of a job.

Plan ahead, be selective, keep your goal in mind, and you will be successful.

First, make a stronger candidate out of yourself– one who stands out among your peers. This is where co-curricular activities like Hart House’s Clubs and Committees come in handy. Think about it – given a choice between two Commerce graduates, would you not choose the one who has purchased soon-to-be Canadian art masterpieces, planned major campus-wide events, or hosted a dialogue with the likes of Noam Chomsky or Pico Iyer? (Also, according to Professor Kidd, many alumni end up in careers that emanate from the passions that they discovered while taking a Hart House class or participating in one of the clubs.)

Second, realize that your first job is much more than a quick way to make money or to fill a line on your resumé: it’s the stepping stone for a series of increasingly better jobs down the line. So ask yourself where you want to be in five years and work backwards from that. Do not consider any potential jobs until they give you the skills and experience to advance your career plan. Once you’ve determined what kinds of positions match your criteria, contact the appropriate companies—even if they’re not hiring.

“Find out who your manager might be and ask for an interview. This won’t always work, but if they do give you the time of the day, you’re more likely to be remembered next time they have an opening,” says Kidd.

Third, when you attend job interviews, keep in mind you’re not the only one being interviewed.

"It goes both ways,” says Kidd. “You owe it to yourself to ask questions and do your best to determine whether that’s a place you want to be a part of, one whose culture matches yours and where you’re confident you can do good work.”

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