Emma Borden
Emma Borden (she/her) is a grade 10 student from Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She chose to attend ShadAnywhere so that she could enjoy her summer close to family while building the skills that will help her continue to be a leader for Black youth in her community. Emma shared what a day at ShadAnywhere was like from the East Coast of Canada.
9:30am AST
I wake up and grab some breakfast. French toast is supreme. After breakfast, I get my desk setup for the day at Shad, then I get to work on the sun mural on my wall. During our ShadAnywhere program we had a session on personal growth. Painting this mural is a form of personal growth for me. Attending the ShadAnywhere program not only sets you up for future success, but also helps you to get to know yourself better. It encourages your personal interests and passions.
12:00pm AST
I log onto the first ShadAnywhere meeting of the day. The first thing we do is our opening, where we get our check in questions. Today we were asked, “If you could transport yourself into any movie or book that you choose, what movie/book would you choose and why?” My response was that I’d choose to enter Phineas and Ferb. It just seems like so much fun. After our morning meeting we head straight into our design teams.
12:30pm AST
In our design teams today, we started with chatting about our check in questions, which morphed into talking about boxed vs bagged milk and the convenience of double-sided tape. We’ve been working on our design projects for the past two-three weeks and are now entering the ideation phase of the project. We began with looking for more ways to make living spaces in Canada more sustainable, accessible and ways to promote community. Today, we specifically looked at solutions and why said solutions were great. Design teamwork is extremely fun and interactive. Once everyone is close enough to one another you become a small nook. Your design team is your Shad family.
2:15pm AST
We headed for our first break of the day. I decided to grab a snack for later, and while I waited, I sat at my keyboard and rehearsed for a bit. Our facilitators include as many breaks as possible during the day as they also recognize the desk drag. There are also activities we complete outside and a common joke this year was our “touch grass” breaks.
2:30pm AST
I log back onto the Shad call for the next session, which is a presentation from Nukskahtowin AU about Traditional Knowledge by Pricilla Campeau and Ivy Lalonde. We watched a quick video. We are also very lucky to have gotten to see a draft of the Athabasca University land acknowledgement draft.
3:15pm AST
I read some of my book and get some water. I also toyed with some of the magic tricks we learned on the previous Friday during Shad. We had an amazing guest speaker come in and teach us some tricks.
4:00pm AST
Made it back from break for a “Platonic solids” presentation from Dr. Angela Beltaos. The session was split into two, one with talking and getting a greater understanding of the task we were to preform and the second with us making our own set of platonic solids. We had to track how many faces, vertices and edges each shape had and for each shape how many sides and number of vertices at each edge.
5:00pm AST
We headed into breakout rooms to build our shapes and one of our facilitators played some Taylor Swift for us.
5:53pm AST
Closing time! We closed out for the day after getting tomorrow’s schedule, filling out the daily reflection, and getting to see our facilitator Chris’ chicken! There’s never a dull moment in the ShadAnywhere program and I can’t think of a better way to be spending my summer.
