I got the wonderful opportunity to attend Jack Summit this year as a delegate. It’s a 2-day mental health conference that gathers 200 young leaders across Canada to Toronto and brainstorm initiatives to combat stigma around youth mental health. Delegates from every single province, including Yukon and Nunavut came down for this event.
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Some context:
A boy named Jack studying in Queens University died tragically by suicide several years ago. His parents’ Eric Windler and Sandra Hanington founded jack.org in his memory serving to promote youth mental wellness. This organization really took off in the few short years, hosting a huge summit that attracts students all over Canada to come down and get involved.
I bussed down to Toronto Thursday evening, where all the delegates were housed in the downtown Holiday Inn. Transportation, hotel rooms, food, entertainment was all covered! Over half of the delegates flew in from outside of Ontario, in which airfare was all covered. That was quite amazing, as they managed to leverage RBC as a major sponsor.
I checked into the hotel around 7pm, where I dropped off my luggage in my room and registered with the conference. I was given a T-shirt and directed to a social going on in the hotel bar.
This was my room. I was supposed to have a roommate, but he never showed up. So I had the room all to myself.
Some snacks were laid out and the 200 students mingled. I was quite surprised to find lots of high school students, as young as grade 10, were here! Its fantastic people are getting out and attending these events so young – I would have loved to do so myself but wasn’t aware of them in high school (and for the most part of undergrad!).
No special events was hosted tonight, many people retired to their rooms for the early morning tomorrow.
The next morning, everyone met up at MaRS centre, a huge innovation hub in the core of downtown Toronto, 9am sharp for breakfast.
Eric Windler, the founder, gave a speech about Jack.org, and introduced their RBC sponsors. Afterwards, organizers standing 1 floor above began throwing free hats down for attendees, it was quite the spectacle.
If you look closely, you make see the hats thrown down to us.
We regrouped back the main conference center and split up into mini tables. Several keynote delivered speeches on how important mental health is, and its impact on their lives. Afterwards, they gave us prompts on stage, and we have 30 min in our groups to brainstorm ideas around their prompt. A facilitator was present at each table to record ideas. For example, a prompt would be, “how do we make conversations on mental health more open?” Our table would talk about the barrier to this – i.e., people associate mental health issues as being weak, people don’t know how to respond to this, we need educational campaigns to overcome this stigma.
We broke for lunch, which was provided by Air Canada sponsorship. Each delegate got a portioned meal of sandwich, side and dessert. It was not a buffet style, but snacks and chips were available anytime during the day at each table.
Much of the afternoon was spent continuing the brainstorming sessions. By 5pm, everyone was quite drained and the session ended. We were told to meet back in the hotel lobby at 6:30pm for a surprise social event.
Yellow buses were parked outside to take us to an offsite retreat: We arrived at the Ontario Science Centre. They booked out the entire museum that night for us. It was VIP treatment indeed! As we wandered the museum, Jack.org hired live music performance playing center stage. Food stands serving poutine, sliders and grilled cheese was also available. An optional cash bar was available.
The entire museum was rented out for us to run wild.
Here was a bunch of demo around physical sciences. Things like friction, gravity, electrical conductance, flow and other phenomena are discussed. It was probably targeted at elementary school children, but was still cool nevertheless.
This was a flow apparatus that was programmed to display various portraits through bubbles. I think this is Mona Lisa.
Here was the catering provided. Station 1 was poutine, with self serve bacon bits and various sauces.
Station 2 featured sliders, with additional condiments like chips, pickles, onions, the usual.
The last stand was grilled cheese. You can add a varying assortment of cheeses, deli meats and sauces.
Here is my poutine, lathered in chipotle sauce and bacon.
All the while, live Jazz music was playing in the background. The atmosphere was very intimate and welcoming.
We walked into the brain centre. Lots of demos and interactive material on neuroscience.
This is a statue of the homunculus, the sensory region along cortex.
How we interpret images. Did you know images are projected upside down on our retinas, and the brain processes the image properly.
This was a really fun station. THere were lots of mechanical puzzles you had to take apart. Some were quite challenging and required a lot of mental dexterity.
It was an amazing night. The busses took us back to our hotel around 11pm for a final session tomorrow night.
The following morning continued with brainstorming sessions interjected with keynote speakers.
Lunch was served at 12pm, with the same food served as yesterday.
After lunch, everyone went out to the atrium for a group photo. A nice surprise followed: A beatboxer and breakdancer made an appearance and performed for us!
We filled back in, where Jack’s mom, Sandra Hanington delivered an inspiring closing address. She was such a great speaker so I had to look her up. Turns out, she is the current CEO of Royal Canadian Mint! No wonder. Thanks were given out to organizing committee and sponsors, and we watched a recap video. The productions crews were filming all weekend long and put together a polished video at the end for us. The amazing thing is, the recap video contained clips that occurred literally 30 min before viewing – they must have worked real fast!
The Summit concluded at 3pm Saturday afternoon. It was honestly a great experience and the best organized and executed event I attended. Hats off to everyone involved with Jack.org. I dug up their financial statements and found this conference cost $222, 460 to run! That’s $1000/attendee.
Wow seems like fun!