Toronto Oasis, Secular Community

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.

Our featured speaker this week will be Barbara Hodder.  Barbara will share the story of her journey to Canada and why she serves in the Canadian Armed Forces and how she uses her position to inspire and lead.

Born in Rochester, New York, A/SLt Hodder resides in downtown Toronto with her husband, MWO Darrin Hicks, CD (7^th Toronto Royal Canadian Artillery).  The eldest of three children, her parents, siblings and extended family still reside in various parts of the United States.  She immigrated to Canada in 2003 and became a Canadian citizen on June 24, 2014.  As a newly minted Canadian she felt drawn to give back to her new home and swore in to the Royal Canadian Navy in 2016 and received her commission in 2017.   

Employed at Scotiabank as a Senior Organizational Change Strategist, A/SLt Hodder holds the Project Management Professional (PMP) designation, as well as designations in Organizational Change Management and Lean Six Sigma.  Her areas of speciality include organizational change, human resources, diversity leadership and major event planning.  She also has a small but growing side career in counseling and life coaching, with a focus on interpersonal relationships and goal achievement. 

A/SLt Hodder earned an MBA from Athabasca University in September 2018 with a focus on Organizational Leadership and Strategy.  She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Technical Communication from Clarkson University (Potsdam, NY) and a Bachelor of Music double major in Music Business and Opera Performance from the Crane School of Music (Potsdam, NY).  A Naval Warfare Officer by trade, A/SLt Hodder currently serves as the Divisional Officer for HMCS YORK band.

For our musical performance this Sunday, we are so happy to have our own Cassie Norton!  Cassie Norton is the music director of Toronto Oasis and a Toronto-based singer-songwriter. She is a classically trained violinist/folk leaning tunesmith with a punk rock heart. She has recorded two full length albums, Little Strength (2009) and Quiet Wilderness (2010).  She teaches a variety of private and ensemble classes at Regent Park School of Music, and at her private studio. Check out her website: www.cassienorton.com

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.

This Sunday our featured speaker, Josephine Grey, will introduce the Basic Income concept in the context of climate change, and spark a discussion about how to build a better future.

Josephine Grey has been a human rights advocate, community organizer and public speaker for more than 30 years.  In 1986 she co-founded Low Income Families Together (LIFT) in Toronto, a resource center run by and for low-income people.  LIFT does community education on human rights, economic and political literacy, incubates community projects and helps provide a voice for low-income people. Josephine was a founding director and co-chair of Foodshare, 1988 to 1994 and a Founding Director of the Center for Social Justice, The Income Security Advocacy Centre, and the St. James Town Community Co-operative. She also helped build the first permanent housing for survivors of domestic abuse, Project Esperance.

In 1995 Josephine was appointed Canada’s Official Observer for domestic issues to the UN World Summit on Social Development. She then coordinated, authored and presented the Ontario People’s Report to the UN committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR) in 1998, a report on Civil and Political Rights in 1999, and another on ESCR in 2006.  She served as the International Secretary for the National Anti-Poverty Organization (NAPO) and liaison to the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a network of over 300 national organizations that challenged and helped defeat the FTAA. Her work has taken her to 7 continents and many world summits and social forums.

Currently, she is engaged in mentoring youth empowerment and climate change resilience projects, and advocating for a rights-based guaranteed basic income. She helped organize and present to the North American Basic Income Conference (Hamilton, May 2018) as a member of the Basic Income Canada Network, and Basic Income Toronto. She is developing a healthy food and water security project in St James Town including climate resilient urban agriculture: the OASIS project, and several related social enterprise co-operatives. Josephine is a widowed single parent of 4, a grandmother, and a social housing tenant. She is dedicated to cultivating human rights-based solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges: extreme inequality, non-sustainability, and climate chaos.

Our featured musical performance will be robertalanfuturehearts – a music and poetry performance by Robert Alan Mackie dedicated to exploring the disposition of our words, the danceability of the rhythm of speech, and the human qualities of the instruments we use to make music. The stories of robertalanfuturehearts dissect specimens of the deeply unsettling and the cosmically whimsical, while the musical compositions make earworms of the abstract spaces no words can inhabit.  Equal parts Alan Ginsberg and Andy Kaufman; equal parts traditional Norwegian village music and modern American free improvisation; a hint of Gestalt therapy and the suggestion of early 2000’s horror films – robertalanfuturehearts is a celebration spoken and sung of all the things we forget to talk about and a commitment to cultivating hope from whence we excavate melancholy.  Here’s a link to this musical act: https://vimeo.com/user78493541

You can RSVP for this on our Meetup page at https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/254367771/

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.

Green Zone Living is a self-help program based on a philosophy that inspires human beings to decrease emotional and social suffering and create a healthy, happy and peaceful lifestyle.  Our featured speaker, Dr. Sohail is the author of a series of books on Green Zone Living.   Dr. Sohail was born and raised in Pakistan. After receiving his medical degree from Peshawar University in Pakistan, he came to Newfoundland to study psychiatry. After getting his FRCP in psychiatry he moved to Ontario and now practices in his Creative Psychotherapy Clinic in Whitby Ontario. He has published more than 20 books in Urdu and English.  His books are available on Amazon Kindle.  Here’s the link:  Amazon Store:  http://www.amazon.com/Dr.-Khalid-Sohail/e/B01BKYPQ4Y?ref_=pe_1724030_132998060

His creations can also be read on his websites:www.drsohail.com  www.greenzoneliving.ca

No stranger to our Toronto Oasis stage, our featured musician will be Erik Bleich! Erik is a singer songwriter whose genre blends classic pop and folk traditions – from street lit lullabies to manic, rambling romps.  It’s his vision of folk music for the Internet Age.  Check out his website: www.erikbleich.com

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.

This Sunday Jess Bootsma will start the discussion off with interesting tidbits (no pun intended) about plant-based eating and then you’ll have a chance to ask questions and learn more about a meatless diet. Jess gave a Veg101 talk earlier this year about how to make the switch to a plant-based diet and this will be a continuation of that presentation. 

Experiences growing up on a dairy farm prompted Jess to question the validity of eating meat. After moving to Toronto, she heard about the Toronto Vegetarian Association (TVA) and promptly became a member. She read John Robins’ books, Diet for a New America and Diet for a New World and these books solidified for her that she was on the right path. Many of the things Robbins talked about she knew to be true but he also made her think about things she’d never thought about before such as how much more a cow eats than a human and why not reduce land use by feeding plants to humans instead of channeling them through animals. Since joining TVA Jess has learned so many more benefits to cutting animal products from the menu. 

Jess often does outreach work for TVA at events such as the Toronto Veg Fest, Veg Spring Market, Vegan Bake-off, Gay Pride Festival and many more. Other retirement pastimes include back-country canoe trips, cross country skiing, hiking, fitness classes, yoga and artwork.

For our musical performance this Sunday, we are so happy to have our own Cassie Norton!  Cassie Norton is the music director of Toronto Oasis and a Toronto-based singer-songwriter. She is a classically trained violinist/folk leaning tunesmith with a punk rock heart. She has recorded two full length albums, Little Strength (2009) and Quiet Wilderness (2010).  She teaches a variety of private and ensemble classes at Regent Park School of Music, and at her private studio. Check out her website: www.cassienorton.com

You can RSVP for this on our Meetup page at https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/254367760/

We have a short video recapping this event:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L8YzizT6sgLxypcnh3cwOkj2Mjb1L7cK/view?usp=sharing

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.

This Sunday our featured speaker Dan Cooperstock will present material from Tim Crane‘s very interesting book with this title. Tim Crane is an atheist professor of philosophy. Dan learned about the book from a review in one of the Skeptic magazines he reads. The presentation will use a PowerPoint kindly given to Dan by the author. The following paragraph is also partly adapted from the book’s liner notes.

The book’s thesis is that the reason the “new atheists” such as Dawkins, Hitchens etc. can make no headway with most religious folks is that they misunderstand religion, treating it as a primitive cosmology, plus some morality. As a result of that, they conclude that religious believers are irrational, superstitious, and bigoted. Crane offers an alternative view of religion, that it is based on two things. The first is the idea of a religious impulse: the sense people have of something transcending the world of ordinary experience. The second is the idea of identification: the fact that religion involves belonging to a specific social group and participating in practices that reinforce the bonds of belonging. The book offers a way of understanding religious belief and offers an explanation of what tolerance of such belief (within limits) should mean, given that it’s not going away!

Tim Crane is a Professor of Philosophy at Central European University, Budapest. Dan Cooperstock is the Toronto Oasis Treasurer, an atheist Quaker, and a software entrepreneur, writing and selling software for churches and charities.

Our featured musician will be Erika Werry.  Erika Werry is a band leader, singer, songwriter and has a background in classical and modern dance.  Her song material is inspired by travels and day-to-day experience, and through a love of classic French and English literature. Erika brings deeply personal, uncompromising and new perspectives to the age-old themes of life and love.  The songs are short and fun, often with tongue-in-cheek lyrical humour and sometimes with devastatingly poignant lyrics on relationships.  A consummate performer, Erika sings and dances through her fast-paced sets. Her songs are delivered with her signature vocals, in a “… lovely… grainy alto”, and The Alphabet, her band, delivers razor sharp accompaniment to her lyrical melodies.  Her website is http://www.erikawerry.com

To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.

We have a short video recapping this event:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gry2zf5EAwHOCBQ6HdVWJ85UO37_hkID/view?usp=sharing

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.

This Sunday we will have a book reading by author Jeff Schmidt.

His book POWER WITHIN begins with his seventy-fifth birthday celebration, held as a fundraiser, a practice that began after loss of his best friend to AIDS.

We are then taken to his first birthday memory at age three in wartime Germany, where the family was soon to be uprooted from a cozy home during severe winter weather.

Emigration to Canada as a child and an adolescence marked by struggles with sexual identity and fitting-in set the stage for a tumultuous life story. Accounts of partner relationships and arrests for gay sex are interwoven with tales of work in the fields of tourism, film acting and landscaping. Travel, painting and volunteering, highlighted by visits to orphanages in India and sponsoring two children, round out the story of later years.

Spiritual searching and meditation point the way to finding the silver lining—the positive—in overcoming difficult situations. Searching for an understanding of life, accepting what is and aiding our neighbour have become of utmost importance to the author, along with active participation in the gay community. Oscar Wilde’s words might sum it all up: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Today, Jeff lives out his happy retirement in central Toronto. Travel, volunteering, painting, and now writing are his main interests. In 2012 he created a short video about his life for the Inside Out Film Festival also called “Power Within”.

For our musical performances we will have Willow Rutherford.  Willow is a troubadour balladeer of folk, jazz, Celtic and traditional standards, with deep roots in the Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver indie music scene. She has composed soundtracks for documentaries and animated shorts.  Willow sings in English, French and Spanish.

To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.

This week our featured speaker will be Steven Karst.  Inspired by Robert Lupton’s book “Toxic Charity” and other research, Steven has found that most people have faulty assumptions about the cause of poverty based on their own perceptions of need. This results in the use of strategies that do considerable harm to the people they are genuinely trying to help. Steven doesn’t fault the motivation of compassionate people wanting to help those in need, he’s been one of them. What he brings to light are the unintended consequences of rightly motivated efforts using examples from his experience working as a construction manager for a non-profit entity in countries likes Indonesia, El Salvador and Venezuela.

Steven is a life long construction professional who entered the industry at age 15, received construction training at George Brown College and was in a hurry to apply his skills, especially in non-profit work. He has worked in the trades and in management and now works in litigation as a construction claims consultant.

Our featured musician will be Emilyn Stam.  Emilyn is a Toronto-based fiddler, pianist and accordionist who creates, performs, records and teaches in folk, trad, and neo-trad styles from Europe and Canada.  She has 4 Canadian Folk Music Award Nominations, (The Shoeless, Eh?!, Lemon Bucket Orkestra) and 2 Juno Award Nominations (Lemon Bucket Orkestra). For more on our musical performer, please check out her website www.emilynstam.com. Emilyn with be performing with her partner John Williams.

To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.

There will be some road closures due to the Scotiabank Marathon. Please check out the link below for a listing the road closures to see if it will affect your route to our venue.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/10/19/major-downtown-road-closures-ttc-diverting-for-scotiabank-marathon-this-weekend-in-toronto.html

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.

Our featured speaker Catherine Francis will lead us in a discussion about the dispute between Trinity Western University and the law societies of Ontario and British Columbia.  The dispute was over the proposed establishment of a Christian law school with a mandatory covenant prohibiting sexual intimacy except between married heterosexual couples.  In a 7-2 split decision released on June 15, 2018, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of the provincial law societies.   

Catherine holds Bachelor of Arts (1981) and Bachelor of Law (1985) degrees from the University of Toronto and was called to the Ontario Bar in 1987.  Catherine is a long-time partner at Minden Gross LLP, a mid-sized downtown Toronto law firm, practicing principally in the areas of commercial and insolvency litigation.  Catherine was raised in a secular household with a strong belief in equality rights and is keenly interested in legal issues affecting the interests of non-believers and the separation of Church and State.  Her website is: https://www.mindengross.com/our-people/details/catherine-francis

Our featured 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/

To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue).  Come early for coffee and conversation at 10:30 am.

Learn the what, how and why of mindfulness, a skill that changes the lives of those who practice it. Over the last 40 years, this adaptation of the ancient Eastern practice of meditation has been spreading across the world, increasingly taught in “third wave” therapies like Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. Modern neuroscience has proven its effectiveness in coping with life’s challenges, particularly those related to problems with anxiety and depression, anger and emotional dysregulation, suicidal ideation and addictions, and other serious mental health problems. By learning how to control our animal brain, we can improve our relationships, make better choices, increase positive emotions, and achieve our goals.

Speaking on this topic, our featured speaker will be Danny Firestone.   Danny is a Registered Psychotherapist with over 30 years of clinical experience working with people struggling with psychological problems, including anxiety, depression, addictions, eating disorders, PTSD and complex trauma, suicidal behaviors, and more serious mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, antisocial and borderline personality disorders, and psychosis. Over the past 15 years, he has had intensive training in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), a modification of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy developed by Marsha Linehan out of the University of Chicago, designed and adapted specifically to treat Borderline Personality Disorder. He has taken a lead role in consulting with and developing a DBT residential treatment program, and has developed and delivered training and workshops in DBT for other service providers. In 2017, after a 35-year career in the public mental health system, Danny quit his job to start a private practice, providing DBT skills training, workshops, and individual or family therapy, while spreading the wisdom of DBT.  His website is PEACEpsychotherapy.ca.

Our musical performer will be singer songwriter Dana Sipos.  www.danasipos.com

Originally hailing from the industrial landscape of Hamilton, Ontario, Dana Sipos inhabited the far Canadian north – Yellowknife, Northwest Territories – for many years before going nomad.  Her captivatingly nuanced songs continue to be infused with a wild wind and a haunting, slightly hypnotic surrealism akin to the mysteries of the North.  Her 2015 release, Roll Up the Night Sky, was nominated for a Canadian folk music award in the Pushing the Boundaries category celebrating innovation in creating new folk sounds.  She has a new album, Trick of the Light, released earlier this year, in spring 2018.

To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.