my hometown is a lovely place to grow up. it's quiet and safe and everything you might hope for from a suburban existence. i'm thankful to have spent childhood and my formative years being safe and good and mostly happy.



i remember the exact moment that i started thinking of Toronto as home. it was April 2018 and i was standing on the roof of the Globe and Mail headquarters in downtown Toronto with eleven new friends. as a Sidewalk Toronto Fellow, we were supposed to represent the future generation of leaders in Toronto, a cross-section of bright young people from fields spanning technology to healthcare to civic politics. we were just kids in love with the idea of city-building and all this hopeful ambition.



they had asked us to arrange ourselves in the space relative to a map of Toronto, in the place we most closely associated with home—regardless of whether it was the actual location we lived—and asked us to name our favourite place in the city. mine is the spot on Line 2 where the subway crosses the Prince Edward Viaduct, and suddenly you're watching sunset over the entire Don Valley.



i left that day with the newfound sense that contributing this much energy to city-building meant that i was all-in on Toronto. i remember thinking that we were going to do amazing things here in this place which we call home. and for the first time, calling this home felt right.