2022 was a celebration of a 5th year for our community and with it a returning to the amazing Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre for an weekend of play. Yes, we focused on the power of play this year and as well as giving folks an opportunity to have fun and games together, we relaxed and enjoyed being back in person after a couple of years of turmoil. Recognizing the strenght of our online presence, we still had some great virtual engagement the week before and after. We were delighted to have our keynote, Lennart Nacke from the University of Waterloo, creating one of our most memorable Friday evenings, with a very energetic experience, we live streamed it too!
2021 was a year of continued challenges and we recognized early that we had to make the TCD2021 experience a virtual one, but that wasn’t going to take away the opportunities. A lot of webcam fatigue needed us to play smart across the week and yes, we did do this across a whole week and two weekends with live and asynchronous activity supported by our wonderful friends at Howspace. The focus on engagement helped us to recognize the potential of our own community engagement and build on our regular check-ins and community connection moments that had been running since early 2020.
2020 was not an easy year for anyone. Little did we know how much we’d be navigating this year and next. We approached TCD2020 with a mindset of change and we moved fully online. Recognizing that our community was hurting through the pandemic, we slimmed down our experience and focused on giving people a space to connect on just one day in November. We also had the infamous Berline Change Days connect and brought both events together for a unique moment in time.
2019 was all about recognizing our values. We had some emotionally charged sessions and really thought provoking moments about the way we are driven in our space to achieve what we want and the change neeeded to fulfill its potential. We were joined by folks from Europe, Australia, Asia and the Americas this year and we had a fantastic shout out from Forbes after the event.
Our first year started with ABC and we found the fantastic Japanese Canadian Culture Centre to be our base. Several European compatriots came over to Toronto and we had some great fun running round rooms, creating images across the walls, posting our thoughts and of course we ended with our now infamous mashups including music, dance and more.