Author: Toronto OASIS

Toronto Oasis will run a third online meeting this upcoming Sunday April 5th. Please review our online meeting instructions at:
https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm but you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am. Volunteers please join by 10:30am.

Our featured speaker will be Helen Jefferson Lenskyj. Helen will give a talk about her recently released book The Olympic Games: A Critical Approach, with the following blurb on its cover:

Do the Olympic games really live up to their glowing reputation? As the biggest global sport mega-event, The Olympic Games command public and media attention, while Olympic mythology and ritual obscure their underlying function as a profit-making business enterprise. In contrast to terms such as ‘Olympic movement’, and ‘Olympic Family’, the concept ‘Olympic Industry’ focuses on sport as an economic and political enterprise, its beneficiaries including sponsors, media and politicians. Negative impacts on host cities and countries disproportionately threaten the lives and welfare of disadvantaged populations.

Citizens’ resistance campaigns have been addressing these issues for decades, with some success. Recent activism focuses on anti-doping initiatives and sexual abuse of young women. Female athletes with ‘differences of sexual development’ are targets of the discriminatory gender policies of the International Association of Athletics Federation that disqualify them from women’s events.

Helen Jefferson Lenskyj is Professor Emerita, University of Toronto, where she taught sociology. Her work as a researcher and activist on gender and sport issues began in the 1980s, and her critique of the Olympic industry include: Inside the Olympic Industry; Olympic Industry Resistance; and Gender, Athletes Rights, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Helen grew up in Australia and has lived in Toronto since 1966. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1983, and was a professor from 1986 until retiring in 2007.   As well as writing books, she enjoys swimming and kayaking. Her website is: www.helenlenskyj.ca

You can RSVP for this on our Meetup page at:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/khgwkrybcgbhb/

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

Toronto Oasis is running our second online meeting this upcoming Sunday March 29th. Please review our online meeting instructions at:
https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm but you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am.

For this second online meeting, we will be having a featured speaker! Our featured speaker will be David Chernushenko, a writer, educator, speaker, film producer and explorer of ‘living lightly’ in our personal and professional lives.

He was twice elected to Ottawa city council (2010-18), where he chaired the Environment and Climate Protection Committee and played a major role in promoting a renewable energy transition, active transportation, complete streets, public health and supportive housing.

He served as a member of Canada’s National Round table on the Environment and the Economy, the International Olympic Committee’s Sport and Environment Commission and as deputy leader of the Green Party of Canada.

He has written three books on sustainable management practices, and produced three films: Be the Change; Powerful: Energy for Everyone; and Bike City, Great City. He recently published his first novel, Burning Souls, an “eco-political thriller.”

Can we move from fearing climate breakdown and grieving ecological destruction to fostering love and determined action? In a time where evidence and personal experience point to our Earth’s natural systems continuing to degrade rapidly, many of us search for our place in this big mess. What is my role? Does it still matter? We’ll explore together how we might face the truth straight on, and chart a path as full of love, compassion and beauty as we can manage. As individuals and as a community.

Please RSVP on meetup:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/269595339/

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

Toronto Oasis will be piloting our first online meeting this upcoming Sunday March 22^nd. Thank you to Clive Hannah, our volunteer social media manager, for setting up and organizing this for us! Clive will be hosting this meeting and will be our MC.

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm but you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am.

For this first online meeting we will have some familiar Toronto Oasis Sunday elements. We will have “Joys & Concerns”, Helen Lenskyj will do the Community Moment and there will be some music (a very timely Tom Lehrer song). Then, instead of a featured speaker, we will run a session of the Toronto Oasis Book Club. To explain how that works, I’ll quote Michael Dorman who typically hosts our Book Club meetings: “We don’t read the same book together. Bring what you are currently reading or have read: books, magazines, comic books, blogs, journals, news articles, fiction and non-fiction and share with others”. Of course, you are welcome to join us regardless of whether there is something you want to share during the Book Club part of our meeting.

Please RSVP on meetup:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/269558227

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Social 10:45am – 11:00am.

Since Confederation, Canadian cities and towns have been seen as creatures of their provinces.  To this day, virtually any decision made by a municipal council can be overturned by a provincial government.  After Doug Ford upended Toronto’s municipal election in 2018, a group of Torontonians consulted widely before developing a two-pronged solution to this longstanding lack of local control.  In his presentation, our featured speaker, Tim Grant, will highlight the key features and engage those in attendance about what services empowered cities should be providing.

Tim Grant is a member of the Steering Committee of Charter City Toronto.  He has run 4 times as a Green Party candidate in the riding of University-Rosedale and for seven years, he chaired the Harbord Village Residents’ Association (i.e. the neighbourhood immediately west of the Koffler House).

Our guest musicians will be CITIZEN JANE, a Toronto-based folk-pop duo that evocatively weaves powerful vocal harmonies with innovative string textures to create an emotionally charged soundscape.

The duo consists of married couple Reenie Perkovic (vocals, guitar, mandolin) and Lea Kirstein (viola, fiddle, cello, vocals), who met while studying classical music on the west coast of Canada. The ladies have since made a home in Toronto’s vibrant music scene.

Reenie grew up in the Toronto area, after her family escaped the civil war in her birthplace, Sarajevo, Bosnia. Reenie was a semi-finalist in the 2016 UK Songwriting Contest, and has released 3 solo albums. She has opened for Juno-nominated Alysha Brilla, and Annabelle Chvostek (Wailin’ Jennys).

Lea is an acclaimed violist and fiddler, who grew up in Victoria, BC, where she studied viola and music education at UVic. Classical musician by day and fiddler by night, Lea discovered new ways of melding the two styles into one. Her passion for these genres took her across Canada & the U.S. with the Folk Arts Quartet. She has recorded with Juno-nominated artists Oliver Schroer and Teresa Doyle. 

Check out their website https://www.citizenjanemusic.com/

You can RSVP for this on our Meetup page at:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/khgwkrybcfbtb/

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Social 10:45am – 11:00am.

This week our featured speaker will be Genessa Radke. Genessa has had a life long passion for jewellery. In 2013 she graduated the Jewellery Methods program in fulfilling a life long dream to become a goldsmith. She has a passion for wax carving and jewellery history.  

Our guest musician will be Nico Paulo, a Portuguese/Canadian singer song-writer. Her debut EP ‘Wave Call’, released earlier this year in January 2020, is a compilation of songs that fit in a landscape of sounds that convey lo-fi Art Folk with a fusion of European and North American folk – it is dreamy, nostalgic and full of harmonies. Check out her music: https://nicopaulo.bandcamp.com/releases

Paul Kaplan will do the Community Moment. The Community Moment is a chance for one of our own to share their journey, thoughts about life, or something personal about themselves. It could be light and silly or it could be emotionally heavy. Either way, you’ll learn more about a valued person in our community. Interested in presenting your own Community Moment? Contact Tania at 416oasis@gmail.com.

You can RSVP for this on our Meetup page at:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/khgwkrybcfblb/

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Social 10:45am – 11:00am.

This week our featured speaker, Clive Hannah, will give a talk about how one IT Consultant went from feeling isolated and alone in our big city of Toronto, to feeling like everywhere he goes is like a cuddle party.

Clive is a Toronto Oasis volunteer, helping us manage our social media. He has a passion for community building. In addition to his volunteer work with Oasis, Clive is also an organizer for Toronto Adults with ADHD Support Group and volunteers his time with a men’s group called MasterHeart. Professionally, Clive is an independent software consultant in IT Enterprise Architecture. All of Clive’s work, professional and volunteer, is driven by wanting to create his life rather than letting life happen to him.

Clive’s talk is an example of one of our own sharing their learning and growth with our community. If you have a topic you have learned about and could give a talk on, contact Tania at 416oasis@gmail.com.

Our featured musicians will be Emilyn Stam and John Williams. Emilyn and John merge the melodic voices of violin and clarinet, creating a modern sound steeped in tradition. Not limited to original music, their repertoire often has a strong connection to traditional dance, and explores a wide palette of sound through various combinations of violin, clarinet, accordion, harmonica and piano. They first started playing music together as members of the Lemon Bucket Orkestra. Currently John also leads the 6-piece old-time jazz band The Boxcar Boys and Emilyn tours with Italian diatonic accordion virtuoso Filippo Gambetta. Their website is https://emilynandjohn.com/

You can RSVP for this on our Meetup page at:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/khgwkrybcfbcb/

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Social 10:45am – 11:00am.

“Multiform Grammar” (MFG) is a grammatical system for the combination of words and images. It illuminates and conceptualizes the ways in which users of both words and images integrate them into cohesive and coherent verbal-visual representations. This grammatical system is timely as it enables us to better understand and apply a mode of communication that is ubiquitous in the digital era. In this talk our featured speaker, Noa Yaari, will show how she is using the MFG in her current art project in the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS) at the university of Toronto focusing on how art can illuminate sensorial and cognitive processes with broad implications.

Noa Yaari, PhD, is a Fellow at the CRRS, artist, curator, and the developer of “Multiform Grammar.” In her scholarship and artwork, she explores verbal-visual or “multiform” rhetoric, especially in the creation and communication of knowledge. She is currently creating an art installation titled “Image-Text Relationships at the CRRS Library,” and preparing a monograph about the MFG for publication. She has earned a PhD in History and an MA in Humanities from York University, an MA in the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas from the Cohn Institute at Tel Aviv University (magna cum laude), and a B.Ed. from Hamidrasha, Beit Berl College, School of Art, Israel. You are welcome to see and follow her work in her monthly blog “The Multiform Grammar Lab.”

Our guest musician will be Cassie Norton, a Toronto-based violinist/singer-songwriter and the music director of Toronto Oasis. Cassie’s music is, at times friendly, familiar, and simple, examining ordinary characters with an extraordinary level of depth. Other times it is more adventurous, rumbling with dissonant and irreverent sounds and epic themes.

Cassie and her band have been performing at Toronto venues such as Burdock Hall, Arrayspace, and The Supermarket since January 2018, and released their first EP: Lullaby for the End of Time in February 2019. In addition, Cassie has recorded two full length albums as a solo artist, Little Strength (2009) and Quiet Wilderness (2010).

When she isn’t busy making her own music, Cassie shares her love of music with others through teaching. She teaches a variety of private and ensemble classes at Regent Park School of Music, and through her private studio. Check out her website: https://www.cassienorton.com/

You can RSVP for this on our Meetup page at:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/khgwkrybcdbfc/

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Social 10:45am – 11:00am.

Emotions originate within our xconscious, and we may consider them negative or uncomfortable. However, the reality is that ignoring our emotions or suppressing them damages our health.

Find out how to work better with all our emotions, including anger etc.

Our featured speaker on this topic will be Phil Cheney. Phil ‘Philosofree’ Cheney is awed by the Cosmos, and excited about human potential. He is a renaissance man who appreciates life, having worked in over 55 countries, including as a university lecturer in his native Australia, trade leader in Thailand, Government budget consultant in Papua New Guinea, software distributor in Zimbabwe, marketer in Germany, Building Construction in China, farm exporting in Japan and author in his current home in Toronto.

Philosofree is a mystic who is curious about integrating science and the metaphysical. He has published 8 books, 5 CDs of original music and won awards for software design and clinical practice in medicine. His education background includes degrees in Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology. Phil prioritizes his wife, daughters and grandchildren, and loves to sing and dance with them.

Our featured musician is Georgia Hathaway. At times dark, at times funny and irreverent, Georgia brings you an intimate and unique set of blues-inspired original songs, weaving in spoken word, laughter, and other noises. Using images from nature and personal stories, she muses on death, love, shadows, and other themes, all to the accompaniment of slide and picked guitar. http://www.georgiahathaway.com/

You can RSVP for this on our Meetup page at:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/khgwkrybcdbmb/