Regent Park Focus

The Little Divas girls program continued on with the songwriting process through the end of November, culminating with the girls performing and recording their own original hip-hop song, "Girls Like Us"! On November 30th, the girls came back together and practiced their own separate parts of the song that they had written with their partner or on their own. After a few practice rounds to make sure they had all the lyrics, rhythm, and tempo worked out and they felt comfortable with their parts, the girls took turns going down to the music recording studio at Regent Park Focus and recording their parts with the musical backing track. Each pair or individual was given the opportunity to record a few different takes of their part of the song, either to fix any mistakes they made or to try different styles or tempos or emphasis in their part. The girls did a really great job with the recording process, and also learned a bit about what it is like to record a song in a professional

This session the girls talked about healthy relationships. We started off by listing traits of a healthy relationship, then we listed traits of an unhealthy one. For a healthy relationship, traits like compromise, respect, and trust were listed, for unhealthy ones, traits like possessiveness, jealousy, and anger were listed.  The girls talked about red flags someone should look out for. When asked what to do when someone you know is in an abusive relationship they said that the person needs someone to help get them out of that situation, I mentioned that some individuals who are in an abusive relationship may not be ready to leave and forcing them to may lead to more trouble than help. We then talked about the cycle of abuse. So what are some things that can be done? A friend can help set up a safety plan, for example the person in the unhealthy relationship could text the friend a word, when the friend sees this word they would call the police. Because the girls did not kno

Catch Da Flava had their final show of 2018 on December 18 th . Our hosts for the show was Iman, Kylie, Shejuanah, Jessica and Meredith. They began defining the difference between immigrants and refugees and discussed why the difference is significant. The show consisted of some videos and articles where information was pulled from. Our hosts also shared their personal stories about their families and friends who have had some difficulties immigrating to Canada, in order to create a better life for themselves and their future family, and also why immigrating to a bigger and more developed country essentially positively impacts families. They also spoke about the long process of immigrating to a new country and the rules and restrictions that apply to immigrants. Some of the main focus was on how immigrants and refugees increase our country's growth. Canada depends on immigrants to use our resources as we compete with other countries to get most people in Canada. We main

Today was incredible due to the awesome support of Rogers Women's Network and the Canadian Women's Foundation! The girls took a field trip to the Rogers Media Communications' campus in downtown Toronto for a experiential skills development activity day with industry mentors. Upon arrival, the girls were seated in a meeting room where one of the presenters, Samantha Crawford, started off with the Land Acknowledgement. After that she offered a quick run-through of what we were going to do that day and introduced us to the people  in the room. This led us into the ice breaker game about what everyone wanted to learn while meeting new people. The girls listed things like: the future, their name, cooking, food, and more. There was a lot of diversity in the things stated by both the girls and the women that work at Rogers. After the ice breaker, a guest speaker, Tracy Moore from Cityline TV, shared a presentation on confidence, resiliency, and how things are unexpected.

The Little Divas girls' program continued into November, taking a break for November 16th when the girls had a PA Day. The next concept we began exploring with the girls was feminism! We obviously started with what feminism is and what types of things feminists believe and advocate for. Below is a sample of the basic ways the concept was introduced and explained for the girls. After the girls had a basic grasp of the concept of feminism and what it means to call yourself a feminist, they were asked whether they would consider themselves feminists personally. Even though the girls generally agreed with the basics of what feminism is, they were still hesitant to accept and embrace the actual label of "feminist" for themselves. This led into an interesting discussion about why the girls felt that they would not immediately label themselves as feminist, even though they did agree with the views and ideas that comprise feminism as a concept. We also then discussed why o

Date:  December 10th , 2018   Hosts :  Paola    Guests :  Frank, Street Health   Topic :  Drug Use and Harm Reduction   This week , Paola hosted an episode on drug use and harm reduction. The first half of the show, focused on the overdose crisis in North America and the importance of safe injection sites and non-judgmental wraparound services for drug users. S tarting off with an interview with Frank from Street Health, we learned a little bit about the history and meaning of harm reduction, or non-judgmental supports like safe injection sites intended to reduce the h arm associated with drug use, and the damaging and deadly consequences of pushing abstinence on drug users. Frank talked a bit about the deadly overdose crisis, and the thousands of deaths annually in Canada from  overdoses, and the important work Street Health and other advocates do at their hard fought for supervised injection sites across the city.    In the second ha

This session the girls created pieces to show and present during the Rogers Communications trip that will be taking place on December 7th. When the girls first arrived the got into groups. There were 3 groups in total and each would be working on something different. One group worked on a spoken word poem, another on a collage, and the last group worked on searching for songs that described confidence and talking about why it was special to them. Some of the songs the group had picked was:                                       - Hall of Fame by The Script                                       - Idol by BTS                                       - Survivor by Destiny's Child The spoken word poem was one about finding confidence in wearing the Hijab and had to do with all the stereotypes that are imposed on females that wear the hijab. The last group worked on a collage that showed confidence. After that the girls brainstormed some questions to ask the workers at roge

For these 2 sessions the girls worked on what they want to achieve after their trip to Rogers Communications on December 7th. They are hoping that it will help them get the knowledge and resources they need to create media related products in the future. A list of topics the girls brainstormed for racism The girls continued brainstorming ways to present information, this being through a television broadcast, a radio program, magazine articles, news reports, and podcasts. Because they really liked the idea of a podcast we went off from that and listed a couple of topics. They came up with 11 topics and voted on four to work on. These were:                                   - Racism                                   - Feminism                                   - Gentrifications                                   - Mental health After they picked these 4 topics we went further in depth about what exactly we would want to talk about in each topic, we completed racism and g

On Tuesday November 27th, Radio Regent's Catch da Flava youth radio show explored the topic of mental health and mental illness. We were fortunate enough to have guest Mike Stroh from mental health organization Starts With Me on the show with us as a guest. Mike answered a number of great questions from the youth and had some important and thought-provoking discussions with us about mental health and mental illness. For more information about Mike's work and Starts With Me, visit  https://startswithme.ca/ We started off the show the way we usually do when we are introducing the topic or issue for the day's episode, which is to provide a definition or general explanation of the main concept. Mike made the important distinction between the terms "mental health" and "mental illness" for us and our listeners. The youth started the discussion off by asking Mike to talk about some of the most common forms of mental illness, especially for youth in part