Mighty Impactful

In this year’s spring exhibition, the grade 10s, 11s and 12s all collaborated together to showcase a project called “Cray, Cray Yay! Yay!”.

What Makes Someone A Community Impact Maker?

We first began with an introduction to the term “crazy ones” through an advertisement for Apple Inc. created by Steve Jobs in the 2000s. After developing a strong definition as a class, we went along and watched three consecutive movies that all represented one or more so-called “crazy ones”. Those movies were Hidden Figures, Amadeus and Gandhi. After we reached the end of a movie, we conducted a Socratic Seminar to showcase our detailed understanding as well as deeper thoughts and connections we might have made. Compared to the Socratic seminars held last semester, I would say that I’ve gained improvement in this area but not as much as I was hoping for. I would love to participate in more next year as I believe that they are a great way of getting me out of my comfort zone in expressing thoughts and opinions in-front of my peers. 

Next we got into our individual products. We each chose someone who we considered to be a “Community Impact Maker”, which is essentially a “crazy one” but on a slightly lesser scale. We would also be personally interviewing and inviting these impact makers to our exhibition, so we gave them a name that would sound less controversial. 

Some literature notes on my research

I decided to base my project on David Foster, the founder of the Harvest Project (and not the famous music producer). In choosing him, I found out so much about how big of a role this organization plays in our community. I gained the most knowledge through my
interview with Joe McGuinness, the Community Engagement Coordinator at Harvest Project. I learned lots about their history and their continued impact today, as well as struggles they have faced as a foundation through obstacles such as COVID-19. 

My Original Design

Finally, let’s get onto the creation itself. Our class was tasked with creating a portrait to represent our Community Impact Makers. From the beginning, I knew that I wanted the main focus of my portrait to be a lot more symbolic rather than showing many details of David Foster’s physical appearance. From that, it meant that I would keep it more simplistic to not distract the audience from the main focus. In my portrait, I wanted to represent the slogan at Harvest Project: “Extending a hand up, not a hand out”. To portray this, I wanted a hand to be pulling another out of a “black hole” which could be seen as poverty or whatever challenges one of Harvest Project’s clients may face. As you can see from my original design, I was hoping to use hands made out of styrofoam as I felt that they would look the most realistic. In the end, I had to use latex gloves that I would stuff with tissue paper that ultimately turned out better than the styrofoam would have.

Once our portraits were done, we had a limited time to prepare the set up for our areas. Everyone’s presentations were separated into different categories: Environment, Business, Arts, Athletics and Service. As the Service section of the gym, my group had a good challenge in decorating an area with this broad
topic. However, we were all quite happy with the way it turned out and managed to have everything fit the theme, even the food. We had Lemon-aid, Caring Cookies and Purposeful Popcorn. Cheesy I know, but it worked!

Me with my final product, credits to my mom

Overall, I believe that this exhibition was actually one of my best. I showed the right level leadership with my exhibition group and broke a small barrier within my speech comfort zone in both the exhibition and Socratic seminars. Through this project, I’ve come to learn that a Community Impact Maker is not just someone who’s done something to impact the community, but also how they’ve inspired others to do the same. This is why I couldn’t have
picked a better person to base my project on, as it was more than just about David Foster’s legacy, but how a dozen staff and hundreds of volunteers continue to help countless individuals and families in a number of different ways every year.

 

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