Regent Park Focus

This was the last sessions the Divas will be attending until fall. The session started out with a couple of games the girls played together. Some examples of the games the girls played included: charades, interview, riddles, and more.  The girls also decided they wanted to host a dance competition. We then had a pizza party and talked about their plans for the summer. Seeing these girls grow and become aware of issues and the power they have has been amazing, they are very excited for the sessions to start again in October. When they had first arrived in the program they seemed very shy and remained fairly quiet, now it's clear to see how their level of confidence has gone up and many of them mentioned that it has helped them at school. Thank you for this amazing year!

 The session on the 16th of May was used as a round table discussion to talk about the girls' opinion about the program so far. After starting with a quick game, the girls started mentioning things they liked and things they would like improved about the program. They then completed their evaluations and started talking about things they would want to learn in future sessions. On the 23rd, the girls went back to taking pictures, this time they were given even more control of how they wanted it to come out and therefore, they spent a long time situating themselves in places where the sun hit them the way they wanted it to. They also played around a lot with their surroundings finding creative ways to take pictures. The pictures are shown below: \

Date:  June 6th, 2019 Hosts:  Shakaila Guests: Shanika, Doula & Mary Rella, Director of Community and Counselling Services at Skylark Topic: #DestigmatizeDepression On June 6 th , our show was all about depression. Depression is a mental illness, specifically a mood disorder, with commonly occurring symptoms including feelings of sadness, irritability, anger and/or hopelessness, fatigue, insomnia, changes in weight in appetite, loss of energy and aches and pain. 11% of Canadian adults have had, have or will have symptoms that meet the criteria for major depression sometime in their life. Studies show that women are more likely to get depression than men and young people aged 15 to 24 are more likely to experience mental illness, including depression, than other age groups. We started the show off by interviewing Shanika, a doula, about her experience working with pregnant people and new parents with perinatal and postnatal depression. Then we interviewed Mary Re

This session the girls worked on creating letters they would write to their future selves. This got them really thinking about their future and what they would like to do.  This somewhat stressed the girls out because they suddenly felt pressured to have their life and future figured out. After some discussion, they felt much more comfortable leaving things unplanned and many stuck to little life lessons they wanted to state. Something the girls each agreed with was that no matter what, they needed to stick together.  The purpose of this activity was for the girls to find values and characteristics of themselves that they would like to keep with them even when they got older. Many talked about positivity and bouncing back from negativity.  While writing this and brainstorming the girls also found a way to pass time by doing riddles, they seemed to know a lot and had a few laughs trying to solve them together.  The girls also mentioned taking a video of these message

This session, the girls worked on photography. Since the weather was so nice we decided it would be best to go outside and get natural lighting for the pictures. The girls planned and took each picture, they worked on directing each other while also keeping lighting and the atmosphere of the picture in mind. Near the end of the session, the girls talked about how much they enjoyed taking these pictures and started planning what they would do if they were to film a video instead. One of the girls was really excited about filming videos, she offered a step by step plan about what it would be about and who she would want in it.   Some of the other planned ideas that had to do with fashion and awareness, though we may not have time to do it this year, the girls are already planning for it when programs resume in fall.