Blue Sky School

Top Ten Best Moments - Part 2 “Grace and Will at the conference” https://tedxottawa.ca/speakers-2019/ Intro The Power of a Dime - Frank O’Dea (Will) The first speaker to take the stage was co-founder of Second Cup and Officer of the Order of Canada Frank O’Dea. He started off his speech by talking about his youth and how he used to be homeless in Toronto. He said that it was a rough and sometimes violent existence. He shared about his drinking problems when he was homeless, saying that he would panhandle with his buddies trying to get enough for a bottle of wine and talking about what they would do tomorrow, “Tomorrow I’ll get a job, Tomorrow I’ll quit drinking, Tomorrow I’ll call my family” then having to choose whether or not to sleep inside or out. He finally realized that he had two choices, “Die or change.” That’s when he thought about an ad he heard in a shop that was about alcoholism that kept repeating a phone number. He went to the nearest payphone a...

Top Ten Best Moments(Part 1) “Grace and Will at the thing” https://tedxottawa.ca/speakers-2019/ Intro I think I can speak for both Grace and I when I say that we had an amazing time at TEDx Ottawa. But before we get into that we should talk about how we were invited. We were invited because of our participation in a program at our school called Eloquent Ottawa which was created by the, you guessed it Canadian Institute of Mass Communications(Or CIMC). The CIMC just so happened to be a sponsor of TEDx Ottawa. With that out of the way time for the story of getting there. After school on the big day we jumped into Karen’s car and went straight to Pita Pit  to fuel up. Then we hit the open road and drove to the Tunney’s Pasture LRT station. We rode to Rideau and then set off on an adventure to find the NAC. We walked in the direction we thought it was for a few minutes until we were on some bridge. That’s when we admitted that we had no idea where it was. So we broke out...