The windows of a street-front store at 1680 Kingston Road are covered up with brown paper. On the outside are two small cutouts and handmade decals that invite people who are walking down the street to “look at how beautiful I am.” When they peek in, there’s no view inside, just a mirror reflecting back at them. It’s a nod to the idea that beauty can be found when you look in the mirror.

Just a bit lower, a second cutout is placed for kids, giving them the same simple but powerful message. Every morning, fingerprints have shown up on the glass, making this under-construction storefront an attraction for families who stroll down Kingston Road in Scarborough’s Birch Cliff neighbourhood.

These are the kind of details that tell you everything about what Daniel Naraine and his family are trying to create behind their latest venture for the community in Toronto’s East.

When I first walked into Bodega by City Cottage, I expected the usual scene of a space under construction. I expected a team of designers, contractors and investors working against time to meet a launch deadline. Instead, I found Daniel working by himself, laser-focused on bringing his vision to life, with his own two hands.

A power saw sat in the far end which was used to cut wood pieces for the bar shelves he was building from scratch. His tools were neatly organized in different box shelves for quick access to tackle the task of the day. Pieces of his artwork were stacked at two opposing walls and accompanied by empty industrial refrigerators humming. The space while still unfinished was already coming to life with each cut of wood that Daniel would make, adding to the completion of the bar section that he was building.

I sat down with Daniel on a Friday morning two months before while he was working on the new venture and two months before the official opening date, to chop it up about how he got here and why spaces like this matter to him.

Daniel: When you’re in those Puerto Rican or Dominican neighbourhoods or anywhere in New York and the boroughs, you find that bodegas are a place where you could go grab your fresh deli sandwich, but also where you go and meet your neighbours to say hi and catch up with them.

While Toronto doesn’t have the same scale of bodega culture, Daniel has always wanted to bring this type of convenience to the community he now lives in. Bodega by City Cottage is the second expansion of the City Cottage brand, which he plans to keep growing across Toronto. For Daniel, the bodega is meant to be a hub where people can connect around food and all things local.

The Artist known as Art Wobbly

Daniel's sense of design and community comes from being a self-made artist. In the creative world, he goes by Art Wobbly, a name his nephew gave him as a kid and something that stuck with him as his art moniker. Having success in gallery spaces like The Local, he kept the two identities separate on purpose, not wanting the business to make the art successful or the art to validate the business. His artworks draws from his raw and personal thoughts as he writes them directly onto the canvases and then paints over them. His words are often hidden on those canvases, acting like the foundation that only a few people see, much like the work that is going on behind the scenes to build the bodega.

Daniel: Behind this counter is a bit of a performance that goes on. Not with my artwork, I can write whatever I want on there and cover it up, but I know it's there."

Along with his art, family plays a central part in why Daniel builds. Throughout the morning, I got a chance to say hello to both his parents; his father Mohan, an entrepreneur in the software space who was taking a meeting, and his mother Elaine, who was working the counter at their, helping me with my cup of coffee before I picked up the camera to the document the day.

His wife and business partner, Liana who runs the operational backend of the City Cottage brand stopped by as well, along with their two dogs Bzee and Kit. In conversations Daniel attributes much of his and the City Cottage’s success to Liana who balances out his energetic and go with the flow personality. Meeting the family behind the scenes wasn’t anything planned, but that’s just how the day worked when Daniel runs a business that has become an extension of his household.

Growing up as a kid from Brampton, where he had ample space, and then building a life and career in the hustle and bustle of Toronto’s Liberty Village, Daniel shares that he became an adopted son of Scarborough when he moved out east nine years ago. He had built a successful career in software sales and thought he would retire by 40. Then they hit the reality of Toronto’s housing market at its peak, struggling to find something within their budget around the city’s core.

He remembers scrolling too far on Google Maps one day and finding a blue dot with a backyard, right next to Lake Ontario. That was nine years ago, when the decision was made and they moved out east to Scarborough to their new home. The house was cottage built by the city back in the day, and that’s what made way to the name and brand City Cottage.

Daniel: It wasn't until I came out to Scarborough where I really realized what fucking culture was.

He had travelled around the world, and there was a lot of relatability to that for him in Scarborough, the overload of senses, different faces, different cultures. He fell in love with it really quickly, but also realized there was a gap in the specific area of Birch Cliff; not just in food, but for a space that could bring people and culture together.

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A Business That Supports Local As Its Core Purpose

The idea of building and supporting local in Canada has been given new life ever since the U.S. trade wars and tariffs have rattled our economy. Big box stores have jumped on the bandwagon, rebranding shelves that monetize product sections with “Made In Canada” signage almost overnight, as a result of our newfound national sentiment for elbows up. But for Daniel, supporting local was never a response to the economic pressures; it was always part of their business model and the primary reason he started the Market by City Cottage in the first place.

Daniel: Saying supporting local and doing supporting local are two fucking different things. I got sick of hearing people say it and wanting to do something. I think that’s where the line for me is totally different.

Market by City Cottage is a business that started during the pandemic on the street where he lived. After building a career in software sales with Fortune 500 and 100 companies across New York, Toronto, and the UK, he noticed that the time spent working virtually and closing contracts at 2 a.m. to hit month-end quotes was starting to erode his sense of purpose. The pandemic had fundamentally shifted how people experienced work-life balance, and it pushed him to start thinking about what he wanted to build in life.

Daniel: I realized this neighbourhood needed something. Almost like a little touch of the West End had to come out here, and by that, I mean convenience, access to nice products, whole food products, good ingredients. You know, not just packaged nicely, but the intent is there too.

During the pandemic, Daniel kept hearing the term “essential services,” and it stuck with him. He saw how restaurants were closing, and local producers couldn’t access their own facilities to make products. He saw this as an opportunity to become a central hub where local food entrepreneurs could get their products on shelves and directly access a community.

Daniel didn’t have a business plan or food-industry experience, but, coming from software sales, he had some transferable skills and was determined to make things work. A neighbour introduced him to their first corner shop, where they got started with a 300-square-foot space that cost $1,200 a month.

Daniel: I could sell 1200 potatoes if I had to, just to cover it. It didn’t matter. I was it was an opportunity to try something.

The first store outgrew itself within a year during the pandemic, prompting a move further down the corner on Kingston Road. He also learned quickly that a location on a main road won’t necessarily bring visibility to a business where factors like lack of windows, no sun, and limited parking all play a part in making a storefront business successful. So they rebuilt at 1666 Kingston Road, where the Market by City Cottage operates today and will become Cafe by City Cottage as the Bodega opens up.

The bodega is two shops over at 1680 Kingston Road and was the next logical step toward bringing people together. Bodega by City Cottage expands beyond the cafe to carry more fresh and prepared food items, all sourced from producers within the region. While the bodega uses food to bring people in, the space is designed to be more than just a store. Love your hood, love local are two things Daniels says he keeps top of mind for why he’s doing this work.

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A Bodega For Scarborough, A Hub For Building More Community.

Daniel gives me a walkthrough of how the space would be set up and what he plans he had envisioned for comedy nights, art shows, Friday-night farmers markets, Michelin-starred dinner events, and partnerships with local organizations. A second section outside which will host Brett’s Ice Cream Shop and picnic benches aimed at making it a stop for everyone, from kids to families.

For him, bringing people together in the bodega is intentional; there are no two-person tables, no option to isolate. You sit beside your neighbour, and you find out who they are. Daniel sees connectivity as more needed now than ever in the post-pandemic world, where isolation is continuing to be fuelled by addiction to digital devices.

He also understands that what he’s building in Birch Cliff isn’t the norm, but he isn’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers to create a more inclusive space where community can flourish.

City Cottage is meant to be the umbrella for this thinking. The cafe, the bodega, eventually a butcher, a fishmonger could each serve as a different point of connection on the same block. Daniel hasn’t taken investors or hired contractors for his latest venture. The freedom to build it his way, on his own timeline, with his own hands, is the point.

What he did share on how the Bodega came to be was that the community came together to give him a shot at building something that was needed. The bodega is being built on land that was bought by customers who saw the need to change the walkability of how the community was being created in their neighbourhood.

Daniel: Liana said to me yesterday, you’re going be so sad when you’re done building this.

Daniel can’t say exactly what the bodega will grow to be after it’s starting stages. He has ideas, but he’s honest about building the pieces day by day, much like how he crafts his canvases, which start with one thought and end with something else. What he does know is that the space needs to exist. Not for him, but for the people who live in Scarborough and the ones who will eventually find their way here.

For Daniel, there’s nothing better than investing in your own neighbourhood. The whole local movement for him is just having pride for other people and giving people a chance, especially those who don’t get the chance to get out into bigger markets.

Towards the end of our conversation, Daniel sat down on the couch in the back of the bodega for the first time. He paused for a second and looked around the room. It was the first time all morning he had stopped moving.

Daniel: I want to create a neighbourhood and a block or help be a part of a city that my son gets that little bit of experience, where he has pride in where he’s from.

The night before, after a day of building some of the shelving from scratch and running electrical lighting, he told me he stood in the empty space by himself and said out loud “good fucking job. It’s impressive, you’ve never done that before.”

It was a moment where he could take a second for himself and celebrate the little wins, like building a new skill while building the business. Something he could share with son and family.

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Location: Mornelle Court

SCARBOROUGH, ON: All Stars Community Outreach SafeWalk Program in Mornelle Court on March 12, 2026

Captured while on assignment for Northpine Foundation

On March 12, 2026, in the heart of East Scarborough, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow & Deputy Mayor Paul Ainslie walked with primary school students and community leaders as part of the All Stars Community Outreach SafeWalk Program in Mornelle Court.

The morning SafeWalk program begins at 8:00 AM, when adult volunteers pick up students from their apartment building and walk them together to their school. At 3:00 PM, the team takes the second afternoon walk to bring the kids home.

The SafeWalk program was born out of tragedy after a string of gun violence impacted the Mornelle Court community in 2008, taking the life of a 17-year-old boy.

When people were afraid to walk in the community, and student attendance at school had plummeted, Angela Brackett stepped up to address a community need.

She founded the Mornelle All-Stars Residents Coalition, which launched a supervised “safewalk” intervention to make the neighbourhood safe for families again by walking kids to the local public school.

She has continued to keep the program running for 17 years, supported by a community of residents and volunteers who have worked to improve the overall health, welfare, and safety of Mornelle Court.

Northpine Foundation has invested in seeing All-Stars Community Outreach Grow to support more families in Scarborough, with the next community being Galloway.

Image Above: Deputy Mayor Paul Ainslie waits at Mornelle Court in Scarborough, with All Stars Community Outreach team Angela Brackett & Shanti Chand, community volunteers & Northpine Foundation’s Impact director, Neel Joshi, before the SafeWalk program begins.

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Image Above: Officers from Toronto Police 43 Division’s Community Engagement unit support the program, helping bridge the gap between local law enforcement and a community that has long felt disconnected.

Image Above: Students from the nearby primary school walk back to Mornelle Court with the All Stars Community Outreach's SafeWalk program as part of the organization’s after-school programming, which has grown to include homework help, a book club and camps over March break and the summer.

Readers Note:

When we think about creating change, it’s the people on the ground with lived experience who know how to address the challenges in their own communities.

The moment that stayed with me on this day was seeing Mayor Olivia Chow and Deputy Mayor Paul Ainslie walk with Angela Brackett and the All Stars community volunteers.

There was no other media present, just public officials recognizing, acknowledging and listening to how the behind-the-scenes work that’s been happening for 17 years.

I grew up in Scarborough, knowing that the communities here have always taken care of themselves because it feels like no one else will.

That’s why it’s important for us to keep documenting and sharing these stories from the perspective of the people leading the change from the ground up.

For communities like Mornelle Court that have long faced systemic challenges, people like Angela Brackett and the All Stars Community Outreach volunteer team are the heroes leading the everyday change.

The world needs to know about it.

Sid Naidu

If you have a story tip on community solutions, climate stories or cultural shifts worth paying attention to, you can reach me at sid@changemade.co

About All Stars Community Outreach: All Stars Community Outreach is a Scarborough-based registered charity founded by Angela Brackett in Mornelle Court, which has been running community safety, education, and outreach programs for children, youth, families, and seniors since 2008.

For more information: allstarscommunityoutreach.ca

About Northpine Foundation: Northpine invests in opportunities to break the cycle of poverty and help underinvested communities thrive. All Stars Community Outreach is one of their investees.

For more information: northpinefoundation.ca

Learn More

• The Stars of Mornelle Court via Toronto Community Housing (2024)

• Mornelle Court residents took ‘our community back’ from gun violence. Now grades are up, crime is down and police services are taking note via the Toronto Star (2020)

• Safe Walk program helps Mornelle kids get to school via CBC (2016)

• Ambitious teen remembered as family, friends grieve via The Globe & Mail (2008)

Building mentorship programs and community initiatives has been part of my work for well over a decade. It started during my undergraduate studies, where I applied that interest of community development to further my learning in the humanities, but the real lessons came from the lived experiences of growing up in communities where opportunities and resources for social and economic growth were limited.

Over time, that mix of education and real-world experience became the catalyst for how I created projects across different sectors from post-secondary education to the creative industries.

The Mentorship Model that Taught Me How to Build

I want to highlight a mentorship model that shaped how I think about peer learning as a model for change.

My first professional career role after my undergrad was as a mentoring officer for the Tri-Mentoring Program at Toronto Metropolitan University. The Tri-Mentoring Program was developed by Liza Arnason and launched in 2001 as a pilot program to support student retention and improve career outcomes for first-generation students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Definition: A first generation student is someone whose parents or guardians have not completed post-secondary education. These students become the first in their family to navigate higher education, often facing challenges such as financial pressure and difficulty navigating campus resources.

The program was built on a simple but powerful idea to support students at different stages of their journey.

It started with peer mentorship where first-year students (mentees) were paired with upper-year students (mentors) who could help them connect with campus life, classes, and the many questions that come with navigating education as a first-generation student.

As those students gained experience, they moved into the next stage of leadership development. Many of the same mentees later became mentors themselves, guiding the next group of students, while learning how to lead, communicate, and support others.

The final stage was connecting students to career mentors from industry. In their final years of study, student mentors were matched with professionals who could offer advice, expand their networks, and help them prepare for life after graduation.

There are three reasons why I saw this mentorship model as impactful

1. It builds community: Students don’t feel alone in their journey because they have a peer to guide them.

2. It creates a mentorship cycle: mentees eventually become mentors, keeping knowledge growing within the community.

3. It bridges education and careers: The mentorship continues by connecting students to professionals before they graduate.

For many students from under-resourced or first-generation backgrounds, this type of structure can make the difference between dropping out and finding a path forward.

My commitment to mentorship grew stronger after I graduated and joined the program as a mentoring officer. The role helped me turn my passion into a profession that I didn’t think was possible.

During those early years I had already been building informal mentorship networks through student life by creating cultural groups and community events, but this experience showed me how to turn that work into a structured program that could support more people.

From Community Learning to Creative Action

As I focused more on my purpose, storytelling and creating change became central to my work and I began sharing what I had learned about how mentorship and community-building could drive real social impact.

Some of these early ideas came out in my first public talks, including a 2012 TEDx talk at my alma mater, where I discussed my experiences and how we can act on change through community. It grounded my focus on creating spaces for others whether through mentorships or through physical spaces that provide a platform for community.

As I moved from education into international development and the creative industries, I learned a lot by both taking part in and building mentorship programs with civic and non-profit institutions both locally and internationally.

I had seen mentorship work in education. The next question for me became what would this look like in the creative industries?

As a visual documentarian using the camera to tell stories, one area that quickly caught my attention was community arts programming. I saw how art could be a tool for change by helping communities come together and amplifying voices that often go unheard.

Over time, I’ve taken what I learned from mentorship and community arts programming so it could be adapted to my own programming in the creative industries as way to create impact in underserved neighbourhoods.

That work really took shape as we created our first social impact documentary project

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Scarborough Made as a Model for Community Arts.

When my creative partner, Alex Narvaez, and I co-founded Scarborough Made, it was our way of changing how traditional media told stories about our communities in Toronto’s East. We wanted to highlight the people we grew up around; the everyday heroes, the cultural instigators, and the voices that could share a real human perspective on what it meant to come from Scarborough.

In that first year, we hit the ground running, producing over 30 stories through photography and cinematography. A short segment debuted online, and the full project launched at Nuit Blanche Toronto in 2019, one of Canada’s largest all-night arts festivals.

From those stories, we started building the foundations and pillars of a social impact project that used documentary storytelling and public art to engage the community, turning our experiences into something the world could see and feel.

But we knew one integral piece was missing from this work. Like many artists from Scarborough, our lived experiences was that we had to leave Scarborough to find work because the local creative economy lacked the support and funding. Our own high school arts programs influenced our interest in the creative industries, but there was no clear path for us to sustain that growth in Scarborough.

Scarborough Made was about amplifying the voices in our communities and to truthfully accomplish that, we couldn’t do it alone.

For us the most valuable part of this work was the creative mentorship programming that was built around it which helped us pass the torch to others who could become documentary storytellers for the project.

It allowed me to dig back into my knowledge as a grant writer and community builder to bring back funding and resources to Scarborough that could support emerging youth artists from equity deserving populations.

From 2021 to 2024, we ran yearly creative mentorship programs, supporting BIPOC youth from our neighbourhoods and helped develop skills for community-driven documentary storytelling that grew the work among emerging artists.

In 2025, after five years of building community through Scarborough Made we saw the need to continue that evolution through other projects that we could build.

Scarborough Made showed us that this work was needed more than ever. What changed was the intervention that we had taken on to address the challenge of Scarborough’s perception was no longer needed as more and more people returned to amplify the message of Scarborough to the world.

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Change Made: The Next Chapter

Scarborough Made was created to champion the stories of Toronto’s East and for 5 years, we built community arts programming and public art installations that highlighted the people and culture of our neighbourhoods.

We accomplished what we set out to do and over time I realized the next step was to take my experience as a development practitioner to work and support other communities.

That’s how began. It was the next logical step to bring together lessons from my professional journey through education, international development, and the creative industries. I share how I’ve been building the brand in previous Behind Change Made Dispatch

The north star behind this work is simple: use visual storytelling and journalism to explore how people are creating change.

It was a space where we could move from reporting on how the system is broken to look at how communities are responding to challenges or creating solutions to fix it.

A big part of this work is focused on solutions journalism stories that show how people, organizations, and communities are tackling real problems.

We’re already putting this into practice through our reporting series “Solutions on the Streets.” One first story for this series “Fades, Frames & Futures,” highlighted how a Scarborough barbershop and a local community group are raising awareness around youth unemployment among Black and racialized youth.

Now we’re building on that work with a new mentorship program to continue telling these stories.

The Next Chapter Program is a micro-mentorship program that we’re launching with PhotoED Magazine & Think Tank for early stage photographers and photojournalists who want to document solutions stories and get published.

Creating this mentorship isn’t about learning how to take better photos. It’s about learning how to see stories differently, how to build trust with communities and document people with care and ethics.

For me, this program is also about investing back into independent community journalism. As local newsrooms close, there are fewer spaces for community stories to be told. Mentorship can help train the next generation of visual journalists who want to document change and culture from where they live through their own perspectives.

Mentorship played a major role in my own journey. It showed me that meaningful work is never built alone. From my early days as a community builder to the programs we created through Scarborough Made, I’ve always tried to create spaces where people can develop their voices and connect use lived experiences to guide their storytelling.

Through The Next Chapter Program, we want to help emerging photographers and photojournalists shape how stories in their communities are seen by not only highlighting the challenges people face but by also showing how they respond to it and push the world forward.

This is the next chapter for Change Made and for storytellers ready to grow with us, I hope it can be the next chapter for you too.

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If you have a solutions story tip or are interested in contributing as to , as always you can reach me at sid@changemade.co.

Changed World is an op-ed series from that discusses current events to explain how we got here, why it matters and what the human dimensions are. Through personal essays and analyses, we cover local and global stories grounded in everyday life to help you better understand our changing world.

It’s time I talk about our changed world.

This weekend, the United States and Israel started a war with Iran by killing its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It’s become a tipping point that plunged the Middle East into another unnecessary conflict and has caused a major ripple effect worldwide.

Geopolitics, conflict and war are topics I haven’t openly written about beyond academia, but it's something that has defined my own upbringing as an immigrant kid who experienced what it was like to grow up in the Gulf War of 1990.

My parents are Indian, but I was born in Bahrain, a country which recently made headlines in our current news cycle as the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters was bombed by Iran in retaliation.

I was five during the 1990 Gulf War, and at the time, my younger sister was just a month old. At that age, you don’t fully understand the gravity of the situation or have the ability to reflect on what it meant for parents to raise their kids under those conditions of uncertainty and fear.

It’s only recently that I’ve started to unpack what those childhood memories might have meant; to see gas masks in a large discount bin at a supermarket, or to hear sirens go off on outdoor speakers as a warning for a missile strike, or to practice group drills in your primary school so you understand how to shelter in place from a possible attack.

Those memories of what I experienced in my childhood are nothing compared to the horrific trauma children in war zones of the global south are being forced to face and endure today, from Palestine to Afghanistan.

The endless loss of innocent lives is a cost on our human potential & ability to create a better world.

You just have to turn on the news to feel like people are living through one of the most polarized times of our lives.

With divisions between people feeling more present than ever, we can now be fed an endless, algorhythmic loop of humanity’s destruction in 4K, every time we pick up our phones.

During times like this, it’s hard to think about creating change when current events feel completely out of our control. It can push us to disconnect and focus on survival as the only way forward.

It’s even harder to understand how, as people, we can hang on to any hope when war and conflict around the world have become so normalized and made to feel like someone else’s problem.

But that hope and understanding for our shifting world become the most important tools for change.

How Did I Get Here?

My life changed when my parents immigrated to Canada to give my sister and me a better shot at life. They understood the compounded reality that, on top of the rising political tensions, South Asian expatriates in the Middle East could never be afforded the same equal rights and opportunities as citizens from there.

Explainer: to understand these dynamics of expatriates in the Middle East, you need to be aware of the Kafala System, explained here by the Council of Foreign Relations.

As my own personal survival instincts kicked in, I packed away those memories of growing up in the Gulf to adapt to a new world in Scarborough, Toronto, which was much different but would become one I could call home.

Those memories of navigating the complexities of being a third culture kid likely pushed me to study international relations during my undergrad, when I first started writing about geopolitical conflicts. It is also what pushed me to pursue a career in international development, where I focused on advocacy-based communications, humanitarian affairs and the alleviation of global poverty.

When I started building the documentary project Scarborough Made almost two decades later in my life and career, I knew some of that work had to take a back seat, so I could make sense of how break into the creative industries while blending my practice of creating and changemaking.

Over the last two years, I’ve brought my focus for development work back to the forefront by leading Change Made’s creative studios to develop advocacy-based media campaigns for nonprofits and charities.

Through our studios, we worked on various media projects that supported humanitarian fundraising campaigns for the people of Gaza, raised awareness about refugee healthcare in Scarborough, and helped engage with Indigenous youth in Canada.

This year I’ve started building the other side of that coin with by reporting on solutions stories aimed at bringing more hope, understanding and awareness so people can have more impact in the world.

But not all stories can or should be boiled down to a simple solution; there are times we need to create space to explain or discuss the gravity of a current event or challenge and how it impacts people on the ground.

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Why Does This Matter?

The point is that change is always evolving and shifting. Change is not always net positive; it doesn’t occur in a controlled environment or in a method that we expect.

That’s why it’s even more important today that we talk about how change, whether good or bad, is shaping the world we live in.

I’m introducing “Changed World” as an op-ed column where I can shed light on topics about current events that matter both locally and globally.

It looks to bring opinion editorial work that offers personal insights and analysis on the current events impacting us, so we can understand one another in a world that has felt more divided.

It’s a place for me to raise important questions during times of war that bring awareness to humanitarian principles and the international law that are being ignored, as we’ve actively seen the targeting of women, children, hospitals and journalists in Gaza and are now again starting to witness in Iran.

Through this column, I’m hoping to spark more conversations with changemakers and experts, offering both snapshots and deeper dives that can help us navigate and explain our changing world together.

I packed away many of my own memories of growing up during the Gulf War because I just shifted to the next challenge, which, for me at that time as a teenager, meant adapting to a new country as a first-generation immigrant.

As immigrants, we don’t often have spaces where we can speak openly about the challenges that define us collectively, and it’s not until we do that we begin to realize our potential to create change and build resilience in adversity.

There is a quote I’ve always gone to in challenging times:

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said it, but the rapper DMX made it more accessible to everyday people to understand.

Right now in our world, we’re seeing more and more suffering by people who didn’t ask for another war and only wanted a life of freedom, where they can dream of a future and exist without fear of losing their families or loved ones.

An opinion article won’t shift an already changing world, but it will help you make sense of it, so we can be prepared to help those who are trying to survive as a result of it.

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If you have a solutions story tip or are interested in contributing as an opinion columnist, as always, you can reach me at sid@changemade.co.

Authors’ Note: Writing about geopolitics and war is challenging. It’s not something that should ever boil down the complexity of conflict into a bite-sized summary or listicle, and requires both a human perspective and empathy to articulate.

Before writing an opinion piece or long form analaysis, I spend a week researching and understanding the topic across different outlets so I can be as factual and knowledgeable as possible in my discourse. I write about these topics, drawing on my background in international relations and development, to offer another lens through which we can view our world.

If you want to see more independent journalism through The Change Made, consider becoming a paid subscriber, as all work on this platform is self-funded. I post dispatches twice a week and sometimes more when a story like this deserves it.

When you think about preparing for a job interview or being on the job hunt, you may consider getting a fresh cut or fade and having a professional headshot taken for your LinkedIn profile, so you can look the part.

Getting your first job as a young man is almost like a rite of passage, but what do you do when you live in a community where access to meaningful employment has become more and more limited, and the ability to get a professional haircut and a portrait is not always financially viable?

During Black History Month, Conrad’s, a local family-owned barbershop, and Scarborough Environmental Association, a grassroots community organization, came together to address youth unemployment by hosting an event for Black and racialized youth in Scarborough, giving them a fresher look for their futures.

The event provided youth with free haircuts and professional portraits as a way to build more support for youth employment in Scarborough

For this solution on the streets story, I spent an afternoon behind the scenes talking with and documenting the people who are showing up to change the narrative of the youth unemployment gap in Toronto’s East.

Solutions On The Streets is a visual solutions journalism series by The Change Made that documents the efforts of people and organizations creating change in communities from the ground up.

The Legacy of Conrad’s Barbershop

Founded in 1975, Conrad’s is one of the first black-owned barber shops in Scarborough, Toronto and an important cultural institution for the community.

Born in New Jersey and raised in Scarborough, Conrad Marshall spent a good part of his life in his father’s barbershop.

His father was the original “Conrad”, who grew up in Trinidad & Tobago and learned to cut hair from a young age. His father took that trade with him to the United States and then to Toronto, Canada, eventually opening up the first shop on Markham & Lawrence in Scarborough.

Conrad reflected on how he got started with his first job as a Scarborough kid,

“For years, I would just run around the shop and sweep. When I reached a certain age, I wanted to make some money. I talked to my dad, ‘so look, Dad, I’m going to come here all day, every day, in the summer and sweep.’ So that’s how I started.”

At 17, he grabbed the clippers and learned to cut from his father. Today, Conrad Marshall carries on his father's legacy as a barber and business owner, running two barber shops. Its foundation that he is proud to come from.

For Conrad, his barbershop serves as a hub and community centre, where events like the one being hosted today for youth serve a real purpose. He sees his shop as an open space where youth can drop by and hang out; it’s his way of leading and serving as an example to them.

Conrad shares, “We have a saying at Conrad’s that says, look good, feel good, live life, so to me, once you feel good, anything is possible.”

More Than a Barbershop

Conrad’s barbershop represents the idea of a third space, something that many of us have been a part of, but we don’t always put into words. Third spaces are physical spaces that exist outside our homes and workplaces, where people can gather informally, connect with one another, and foster community.

These are spaces like libraries, cafes, creative studios, and hair salons or barber shops, where neighbours and residents have different conversations, and it’s where connections are strengthened to create a sense of belonging.

At Conrad’s barber shop, that same dynamic is at play. It’s a community hub where youth can create informal connections with bridges to social impact and opportunities.

Conrad shares this sentiment in what he hopes to accomplish through his shop,

I like to be an example to the youth, so they look at the barber shop and see that they too could have a business that could surpass 50 years. That they too can have a business with more than one location, just to show them as an example, that they could do it.

Explainer: The youth unemployment gap in Canada and Toronto.

The youth unemployment rate in Canada climbed to 14.6% in July 2025, the highest level since September 2010 (excluding the pandemic). That means 15 out of every 100 youth who are actively looking for work couldn’t find it.

That burden is not shared equally for racialized folk.

Statistics Canada data show that youth unemployment in July 2025 among Black youth in Canada was 23.4% (1 in 4 youth), compared to 12% for non-racialized & non-indigenous youth. This means that black youth in Canada face almost double the unemployment rate.

In Toronto, the youth unemployment rate is 19.7%, which means roughly 1 in 5 youth are unable to secure employment. Scarborough is home to large black and racialized populations, and it’s here that we see more of the structural barriers starting to compound for youth, where we find few local jobs and hiring biases.

For Prince, a barber at Conrad’s, the importance of this community event goes beyond numbers. “People are finding it really hard to get employment right now. If a haircut helps an employer take a second look, that matters.”

When a youth walks into Conrad’s, they wait to get their fresh cut for free. It starts with providing access, but it also involves helping them build confidence in a community where employment opportunities are often limited.

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Levelling the Playing Field for Youth in Scarborough

The Scarborough Environmental Association (SEA) is a community-focused organization that doesn’t just focus on the environment. For co-founder Krissan Veerasingam, that means taking care of everyone in Scarborough, regardless of income level.

“We try to prioritize programs for folks who don’t have the same advantages as others in the communities, and through that, we want to create a more equitable Scarborough”

As a community organizer, Krissan Veersingam sees how the terrain in Scarborough is different for youth: communities here have historically been under-resourced, had fewer networking opportunities, and face more hiring biases, such as postal code discrimination.

Krissan expresses the frustration with the current state of youth unemployment in Scarborough,

“Youth want to work. They’re trying to find these opportunities, but the reality is that they don’t exist, even though there’s so much work that needs to be done in our communities.”

When chatting with Krissan, there was a blunt reality to the invisible poverty that communities like Scarborough experience. It was a contributing factor in why an event like this can serve as a microsolution to tackle a larger issue, such as addressing the youth unemployment gap.

Krissan reflects, “If you're from a well-connected or from a well-to-do neighbourhood or family, you're going to get professional photos taken throughout the course of your life, just by you existing in that family. Here, you might not even get a haircut. I didn't get a haircut from a professional barber until I was 23, and there's a lot of youth like that in this community.”

Putting on an event like this in communities that have historically been marginalized is about creating access to the basic tools of employability. For Krissan, the weight of youth unemployment for black and racialized youth shouldn’t be carried alone by local businesses hiring youth from equity-deserving backgrounds. For Krissan, it’s the government's responsibility to address this issue, and events like this become a call to action to advocate for just that.

“What we want to see is Government doing the work that these black owned businesses are doing, where they’re providing opportunities for youth in the community, something that they’ve been doing for decades.”

In my conversations with Krissan, we identified that, as a solution, this is only a drop in a larger bucket that requires more. He sees this event as a starting point for building more resources around meaningful employment for youth in Scarborough, either through resume-building workshops or by connecting youth with other employment organizations.

Through community partnerships, the SEA also provides access to business attire, helping youth get fitted for professional portraits, an important component of the event, which contributes to looking the part.

Framing Futures.

After the fresh cut and fits, participating youth had the opportunity to get a professional portrait taken by photographer & videographer Brandon Mwendo from Hydeout Creative Studios.

Brandon initially joined the Scarborough Environmental Association (SEA), thinking it might be about environmental cleanups, but he learned it covered much more, allowing him to bring his own skills to the table and give back to the community.

Being a fellow Scarborough native and working out of a creative studio in the west end, he brought the idea of contributing as a photographer to Krissan from SEA, adding a vital component to this collaborative event. He packed up his studio gear and set up shop at Conrad’s for the day, taking portraits of the participating youth and community in attendance.

In a job market where applications are often filtered out long before an interview is even granted to youth, visibility matters. A professional image on LinkedIn has become today’s resume and carries a different weight, signalling job readiness.

Bradon sees his role here as supporting youth in that journey.

“I definitely hope that as soon as they get these photos, they refresh their profiles and are motivated to get out there and seek employment.”

In my conversation with Brandon, something that stood out in his approach was about framing this event as a way to build connection and community.

Bradon reflects, “we live in such a big city with so many people, yet I feel we’re so disconnected compared to when you look at rural communities, everybody knows everybody.”

For Brandon, the idea of just helping people in the community and in our communities is something he wants to see reach more people

Brandon shares, “It wasn’t hard to do this, it depends on the resources you have, of course, but we all have our own talents and ways we can help others.”

What stood out most from my time documenting this solution’s story was how the community showed up to support the next generation and offer a helping hand in addressing a problem that is being severely overlooked due to Canada and Toronto’s economic challenges. Creating community events for youth pushes back against the isolation they face as they try to navigate the job market on their own.

As a photojournalist, I understand the power of how a frame can tell a story. Here in Scarborough, just the act of offering free professional portraits gives youths a tangible asset that makes them more job-ready for the future.

A Solutions Starting Point

In a job market where hundreds of applicants compete for entry-level jobs, confidence, presentation, and professional branding matter. A clean haircut and a professional headshot can boost self-confidence among youth in underserved neighbourhoods who are walking into an interview or even applying to a job for the first time.

Third spaces, like Conrad’s, also play an important role in connecting youth with professionals to explore employment pathways they may not have considered at first.

When it comes to solutions to address the youth employment gap, there’s an endless list of interventions to discuss. Governments need to play a role in addressing this gap, whether it’s creating paid youth work placements or expanding funding for mentorship and skills-training programs directly with local businesses in underserved communities, who have been creating informal pathways for youth employment for years.

A collaborative community event like this, hosted for Black History Month, won’t solve youth unemployment in Toronto or Scarborough on its own. They won’t replace the need for public investment and government action.

What it does accomplish is raising awareness and dialogue for more solutions that need to address the youth employment gap faced by black and racialized youth in the Scarboroughs of the world.

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If you have a story tip, especially on community solutions, climate stories or cultural shifts worth paying attention to, you can reach me at sid@changemade.co

If you’d like to see more independent visual journalism stories through The Change Made, consider becoming a paid subscriber, as all work on this platform is self-funded. I post dispatches twice a week and sometimes more when a story like this deserves it.

Solutions On The Streets is a visual solutions journalism series by The Change Made with Sid Naidu that documents the efforts of people and organizations creating change in communities from the ground up.

If you’re new here, welcome. If you’ve followed my creative work for a while, you might be wondering what happened to SNCD Studio.

The simple version is this: SNCD Studio is now Change Made.

SNCD (pronounced “Sync’d”) was founded in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. It was the creative enterprise I built to hold everything I was doing under one umbrella: my photojournalism, community projects by Scarborough Made, and different types of client work. Within a year of launching, SNCD Studio became the service arm of this work; and we evolved to support more organizations through media production, grant fundraising, and digital marketing & web.

I didn’t create Change Made because I wanted a fresher name; it was because the work kept growing, and I needed to organize the house before remodelling it.

I’ve never been the kind of creator who gets it perfect on the first try. I build things, put them out in the world, learn what actually lands, and adjust as needed. Some projects I’ve built were for a season, and others grew way beyond what I could have imagined. What I noticed was that the beats in all of my work have always felt the same: documentary storytelling, community, and social change.

Change Made wasn’t a pivot. It’s a convergence.

My career has taken me through post-secondary education, international development, and the creative industries. Some seasons focused on creating impact-driven stories, and others on building community programs or grassroots initiatives. What got harder to ignore was that change was central in everything I was trying to do.

So if the mission was about change, then the brand had to say that out loud.

The last decade of my work has been full of history and learning. It was when I left a full-time 9-5 career to become a full-time freelancer and business owner. SNCD is a product of all those early experiments, the months of building the plane as I flew it, the years of taking on projects that stretched me, relationship-building and defining the work across countries, and, most importantly, dreaming out the kind of storyteller and community builder I wanted to become.

And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to become more laser-focused on my direction to make the vision stick.

For me, that vision has never been clearer than now: visual storytelling that moves people to action, solutions-focused content that creates more impact and capacity building in communities where the talent lives but resources don’t.

The name “Change Made” fits that vision better than SNCD Studios could, and it pays homage to Scarborough Made, a project that laid the foundation for the creative changemaking work that I’ve built with others.

The biggest decision: separating studio work from editorial work

This part is important, especially if you’re here for the journalism side of what we’re looking to build.

As I began developing Change Made as a social enterprise, I realized I needed to draw a clear line and establish two divisions to fuel the brand.

• Change Made Studios: this is the production side, it’s the profit-generating client work that focuses on the media production business, commissioned documentary work and creative services to help organizations have more impact.

• Change Made Press: this is the editorial side of our work; it’s the independent reporting, visual storytelling and solutions journalism that we’re creating to support knowledge sharing and resource building across local communities.

Both divisions share values and create brand synergy, but separation was essential to protect the integrity of our impact-driven journalism focus, especially in today’s environment, where trust in mainstream media is eroding.

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What the studio is focused on now

With the launch of Change Made, the studio division continued to expand its footprint into a few key areas:

• Media production: photography, cinematography, documentary media and public art

• Grant fundraising: fundraising strategy + writing support for funding applications

• Digital marketing & web: the work that helps good projects get seen

• Business development consulting: communication and governance infrastructure to help organizations scale

I’ve been supporting and building with impact-driven organizations and bodies across the public and private sectors for over 15 years. I’ve focused on building the studios to support these key areas because it’s where the most help is needed in communications.

Despite doing meaningful work, I see many emerging and legacy organizations, particularly in under-resourced communities, struggle time and time again to communicate with their audiences in today’s attention-driven economy.

Why I’m building Change Made

I’ve seen how stories can hold power and create space. I know the change that’s possible when stories are told with care, and I’ve seen what happens when stories are used to divide us.

The stories we produce won’t change the world. It will do something quieter and just as important.

We’re creating stories to help people understand what’s happening, who it’s happening to and what’s possible next.

This is the foundation of Change Made: visual storytelling that makes change easier to understand and easier to act on.

You can expect a newsletter twice a month and more when a story demands it.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for taking the time to understand the story behind Change Made. If you’ve been following my visual storytelling work over the years, or more recently through Scarborough Made, thank you for continuing to follow along.

There’s always more change to be made.

- Sid Naidu

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Before I plan the next few posts, I want to know what would actually be useful to you.

If you felt something, this is probably why

This past Sunday, like many, I showed up for the Benito Bowl more than I did for Super Bowl LX.

The halftime show, which took place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, on February 08, 2026, represented a pivotal moment for storytelling culture and change, which is why I wrote this piece.

We’ve been living in one of the most polarizing political climates of our time, one characterized by who belongs and by national borders, not just in the United States.

When Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, professionally known to the world as Bad Bunny, walked onto one of the biggest stages in America, he used a 13-minute broadcast, viewed by an estimated 135.4 million people, to tell us a story that centred the collective narratives of people defined by resistance and resilience. It played like a cinematic block party, and it also said so much more.

What we saw in Bad Bunny’s performance was a love letter to Puerto Rico and a masterclass in storytelling that critiqued colonialism, economic extraction, and the contested definition of who makes up the identity of America.

This was more than just a performance, where Bad Bunny became the first artist in history to headline a Spanish-language halftime show at the Super Bowl. It was a show that made history, as he used this platform to spark a much-needed public conversation about Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States, reminding anyone who needed it that Puerto Rico has always been part of America, even though it has rarely been treated like it.

As someone who has been following Bad Bunny’s story as a fan but also as a documentarian who has covered topics at the intersections of culture and change across the Americas, I wanted to make sense of Benito’s visual storytelling that was showcased on the global stage.

So let’s break down five of the key moments to talk about how Bad Bunny spoke the loudest for cultural change.

1. Why the Show Began in a Sugarcane Field

The show began with a stage that symbolized and honoured Puerto Rico’s cultural history. The broadcast opened with an aerial shot of jíbaros (traditional Puerto Rican farmers) dressed in all white, working collectively in a sugarcane field. As the camera transitions to the live stage, we’re transported to an elaborate (and alive) set design built around towering sugarcane stalks, where Bad Bunny delivers his first visual storytelling anchor. The visuals of performing among the sugar cane fields were deliberate, a choice that TIME Magazine rightly described as a deliberate nod to Puerto Rico’s colonial past and economic exploitation.

Explainer: The Historical Context of the Sugar Economy in Puerto Rico

Sugarcane was introduced to Puerto Rico by Spanish colonizers in the 1500s and established the plantation systems that relied heavily on enslaved labour, which served the interests of European imperialism. For centuries, sugar has been the backbone of the island’s economy, with the wealth taken from local populations to support colonial empires. When Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States following the 1898 Treaty of Paris (which also ceded control of the Philippines, Guam and relinquished claims to Cuba), the sugar industry underwent a radical restructuring under American corporate control. American interests controlled nearly 98% of the island's sugar-processing capacity, and by 1930, 45% of all arable land in Puerto Rico had been converted into corporate sugar plantations.

So when Bad Bunny emerges from a set designed as a sugarcane field, it reframes the Super Bowl stage instantly with a subtle yet clear history lesson: Puerto Rico’s people and culture come from a land long controlled and exploited by colonialism. It was a reminder that Puerto Rico has always been “American” in the most inconvenient way: creating a culture that the world consumes, while living within an economic relationship that has too often treated the island more as a resource than as a people.

And that’s why the opening of Bad Bunny’s performance matters. A sugarcane field wasn’t just a set for the show; it’s a historical symbol of Puerto Rican culture of resilience against colonial extractive industries, which sets the stage for more.

2. What Number #64 on his Jersey Represented.

Bad Bunny walked out in an all-white football jersey fit. His last name, Ocasio, is across the back, and then 64 is embroidered on both the front and back. It’s a detail that had me wondering whether there was any symbolism, and that's what good storytellers do: they make people ask more questions. Here are two sides of what the interpretation of the number “64” could mean.

Personal Interpretations.

Fans have been widely speculating, with many pointing to the personal, noting that the number 64 references his mother’s birth year, 1964. You can hear Bad Bunny speak about his mom with heartfelt emotions in his Apple Music halftime show interview with Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden. He answered a question from a young person in the audience asking, “Who is someone that has always supported you and had a big impact in your life?”

Other outlets, including Complex, reported that the number “64” was a tribute to Bad Bunny’s late uncle, who played football wearing the same jersey number.

There is another interpretation that felt more connected to Bad Bunny’s overall conversation about Puerto Rico during the halftime show, in which the number 64 could be more politically pointed.

Political Interpretation and Its Connection to Hurricane Maria.

I first heard about it when tuning into New York Times Popcast, where host Joe Coscarelli discussed in their post-halftime show livestream, the symbolism behind the number “64,” which could likely be linked to the initial official death toll reported by the Puerto Rican government following the devastation of Hurricane Maria in September 2017.

PR’s government maintained this number for months despite evidence from people on the ground experiencing this in real time, like residents, journalists and local officials, who disputed that the loss of life was significantly higher due to the collapse of the power grid and failure of recovery efforts.

On The Numbers: An official study by George Washington University, which calculated deaths over a 6-month period, later raised the toll of lives lost as a result of the climate disaster to 2,975. An unofficial study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health placed the toll closer to 4,645 based on household surveys and mortality rates.

The number 64 could very likely be a statement about how Puerto Rico has been treated in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, where the lack of response and recovery efforts by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was widely criticized for its logistical failures.

At the time of this writing, it couldn’t be said with certainty that the jersey is a reference to the initial government death toll from Hurricane Maria, since there are no confirmed reports of this detail post-show.

What I can say is that Bad Bunny’s performance was already structured to highlight Puerto Rico’s story, and this number might very well have something to do with it, given that Bad Bunny has long been a popular voice calling out the government for inaction during Hurricane Maria.

The best storytelling allows an audience to go back and draw their own conclusions. We may be reading more into this, as fans, about the symbolism of 64, but wearing that jersey on the world stage forced people to ask questions they wouldn’t have asked before.

Story Update: Rolling Stone and other outlets confirmed on Monday, February 9th, that the jersey number he wore was for his late uncle, Cutito Ocasio. “I always dreamed of taking my uncle to a Super Bowl,” the Puerto Rican star said in a statement.

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3. How A Flag Became An Act of Resistance.

During the transition to the song “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), often heard as a call for Puerto Rico’s self-autonomy in an era of neocolonialism, Bad Bunny raised the Puerto Rican flag with a light-blue triangle. This was an intentional gesture which connects back to Puerto Rico’s history.

The history of the Puerto Rican flag is a story of resistance. The original design, created in 1895 by the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico in New York, used a light-blue triangle to symbolize the sky and coastal waters, a choice influenced by the flag of the Grito de Lares, the first major revolt against Spanish rule in 1868. After the U.S. took control of the island, the flag became a symbol of resistance.

The U.S.-appointed legislature passed Law 53 in 1948, commonly known as the "Gag Law" (Ley de la Mordaza). This law criminalized pro-independence expression, which included owning or displaying a Puerto Rican flag, singing patriotic songs, or speaking in favour of independence, with penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

When Puerto Rico was granted Commonwealth status in 1952, the flag was legalized, but the shade of blue was changed to a dark navy to match the U.S. flag. The darkening of the flag was often seen as an attempt to strip it of its revolutionary connotations and align it with American sovereignty. The light-blue-triangle version of Puerto Rico’s flag today is widely seen and used as a symbol of the island’s independence movement.

The flag associated with Puerto Rico’s independence movement made for one of the strongest political statements in the halftime show and was easy to miss if you’re not familiar with PR’s history. What made this such an important moment in the show was that it was a coded detail for people who understood what the flag meant. Bad Bunny, carrying the flag of the independent movement, was more than a silent protest; it sparked a conversation about self-determination for Puerto Rico and echoed a defiant stance against government censorship.

Additional Context: The scene itself opened up with a cameo and generational handoff from another Puerto Rican pop legend, Ricky Martin, who performed Bad Bunny’s “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii” (“What happened to Hawaii”), a song from Bad Bunny’s “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” (DtMF) album, drawing parallels between Puerto Rico and Hawaii, two islands that have been largely shaped by U.S. power and tensions around control. The chorus of the song speaks to themes of cultural erasure and gentrification, with lyrics stating that they don’t want to see what happened to Hawaii happen to Puerto Rico as well.

4. When the Power Grid Became the Plot

The set design for “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”) took the ongoing messaging about PR’s self-autonomy and made it clear why: as jíbaros danced on top of electric utility poles while their transformers flared and sparked. This was a visual representation symbolizing the power failure and frequent blackouts that have plagued Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria.

The music video for “El Apagón” incorporated an 18-minute documentary titled Aquí Vive Gente (People Live Here), which brought to life the frequent power cuts in Puerto Rico. The video features commentary and reporting from Puerto Rican journalist Bianca Graulau on everyday life under recurring outages and the politics of energy on the island.

The Context of Electricity and Energy Privatization in Puerto Rico

In June 2021, the distribution and transmission of electricity in Puerto Rico was transferred to LUMA Energy, a private firm. Despite promises of improved service, the island has faced a series of massive outages, rising costs, and a deteriorating electricity grid, leading to widespread protests. The power failures didn’t start with LUMA; Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority (PREPA) had struggled with chronic blackouts since the aftermath of Hurricane María and has also been criticized for corruption and mismanagement.

While El Apagón is already known as an artistic response to the privatization of Puerto Rico’s power, Bad Bunny’s performance of the song can be seen as a critique of governance that prioritizes private profit over the interests of Puerto Ricans. Notably, it’s also the second time we see the jíbaros in the performance, this time working on the electricity poles as a modern-day equivalent of the sugarcane stalks.

Once you understand the context of this, the finale hits differently.

5. The Finale of Who Counts as “America.”

An honourable and heartwarming moment worth mentioning in Bad Bunny’s performance came before the Ricky Martin verse & El Apagón performance, but felt best to include here.

It was when a young kid appeared on set, watching a clip of Bad Bunny’s recent Grammy win. Bad Bunny then approaches the kid and hands him a Grammy award. It was a moment that felt symbolic of passing the torch to the next generation, and Variety later confirmed that it depicted a young Benito in his childhood.

It's moments like these throughout Bad Bunny’s performance that we see his empowerment of everyday people, and in the finale, we see the show's most important collective storytelling moment yet.

For his final act, we see flag bearers racing through the field as Bad Bunny shouts out ¡Que Dios bendiga a América!” (“God Bless America!”). The stadium scoreboard lights up with a line that Bad Bunny voiced at the Grammys just a week prior.

He continues his performance by naming every country and territory from South and Central America, including the Caribbean and Canada. With each name called, the flag bearers of all the countries named created a procession of who truly makes up America. He capped his performance by spiking a football towards the camera with a message inscribed on it

This moment matters because culture, immigration, and national identity are among the most emotionally charged points of conflict, not just in America but around the world, including in Canada, as populism polarizes political divisions against everyday people.

The artistry of Bad Bunny’s storytelling during the halftime show made it clear that America is part of a hemisphere of many people coming together.

Bad Bunny’s performance was not only a love letter to Puerto Rico, putting the island on the world stage, but also a statement of diversity, inclusivity, and hope for many people who have been hurting in these trying times.

Why this story matters now.

Bad Bunny won multiple awards at this year's Grammy for his work behind the album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (DtMF), and was the first artist to ever have a Spanish-language record win album of the year.

DtMF has sparked a cultural awakening, putting Puerto Rico on the world stage long before this year’s Super Bowl. His residency in the capital, San Juan, last year generated an estimated 400 million in revenue for PR’s local economy. Bad Bunny’s decision to forgo a traditional U.S. tour in favour of the San Juan residency was a political and economic statement. Citing concerns over immigration enforcement and the safety of his Latino fans, he made the world come to Puerto Rico.

While Bad Bunny has never been shy about making political statements about ICE and standing up to protest against government inaction in Puerto Rico’s recovery efforts after Hurricane Maria, his halftime show performance thrust him further in the spotlight as an artist who has and will continue to create significant cultural change and needed social commentary for the world through his music.

Bad Bunny didn’t use the Super Bowl to make a statement. He used it to tell a story and that’s why it hit.

I’m writing this story not as someone who is a Boricua (Puerto Rican), and it is important to note that there were so many more cultural symbols that Bad Bunny referenced in his performance, which I could not fully cover due to time, but were just as important as they made everyday people, different cultures, and most importantly, Puerto Ricans feel seen and acknowledged.

I can't speak for Puerto Rico. But I have seen what it looks like when a place is expected to give the world beauty while it fights for basics. Watching Bad Bunny’s halftime show was emotional; it moved me to write this story and reflect on the power of storytelling to create change. In 2018, I visited Puerto Rico with my partner, nine months after Hurricane Maria had impacted the entire island. What we saw was a beautiful island of people, with a complex colonial history and a modern one still reeling from one of the worst climate disasters of its time.

Bearing witness to the challenges there pushed me to continue documenting and telling more stories about culture, our climate, and change in hopes of creating a more connected world through our shared narratives.

I’m writing about this topic because stories of change can be told in many ways. My hope is that this article helps you better understand how social change is told and influenced through culture and narratives.

Bad Bunny has been a growing cultural force and global icon who has made change by moving people to rethink who truly belongs on stage, and through that, he has sent a strong message to the world, letting those who have felt left behind know:

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If you have a story tip, especially on community solutions, climate stories or cultural shifts worth paying attention to, you can reach me at sid@changemade.co.

Authors’ Note: I’ve spent the last two days since the halftime show reviewing reporting & publications, curating licensed images, and fact-checking interpretations as they emerged to produce this longer-form deep dive into the visual storytelling of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show performance.

If you want to see more independent visual journalism through The Change Made, consider becoming a subscriber, as all work on this platform is self-funded. I post dispatches twice a week and sometimes more when a story like this deserves it.

Subscribe now

I’m also sharing sources & further reading from this article to support more knowledge building on the topics I write about. It’s an additional resource I’m making available to the community.

Sources & Recommendations for Further Reading / Listening:

• Watch New York Times Popcast: Breaking Down Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show: A Puerto Rican History Lesson

• Watch Bad Bunny - El Apagón - Aquí Vive Gente (Official Video / Docu) | Un Verano Sin Ti (Spanish)

• Reading: The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein

• Reading: P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Available Feb 24, 2026)

• Follow: Journalist Bianca Graulau for independent reporting insights on Puerto Rico

I’ve spent my life trying to answer a simple question: how do stories move people to create positive change?

It’s a question I’ve asked as a result of carrying a camera, for well over 20 years now, documenting both people and places around the world.

It took me years of building storytelling campaigns, producing different bodies of work and creating independent documentary projects before it started to make sense.

I go into more details about what pushed me to this work in an article, “Making Something Out of Nothing,” which I wrote close to 3 years ago, as I started building the new brand and attempted but failed to get back to writing more regularly.

What I started to see over time was this direct link between our shared narratives and driving action towards social change.

What I learned from looking through the lens was that the stories we share can become a powerful tool for shaping how we see the world.

It’s one of the reasons I decided to push further and focus my career on photojournalism, documentary media production, and communications.

Because the art of storytelling for me is about moving people to take action by sharing different perspectives.

Stories don’t change the world on their own. They change how people understand the world and that’s where change becomes more possible.

Tupac said it best:

I started writing with this a question that’s felt been my life pursuit:

How do stories move people to create change?

I think the answer is simpler than I expected. Stories don’t change the world, they change the people who do

Stories won’t pass policy, write a law or redesign a system, but it will shape the values of people who will.

And a camera can’t carry a movement or solve the climate crisis, but it can document the truth and make injustices harder to ignore.

I built Change Made because I believe that stories can do more than just inform.

They help us see each other more clearly and make change feel more possible.

Stories raise awareness that points towards action.

This newsletter is where I’ve come back to share what I’m working on, what I’m learning, and how I’m building Change made as a visual journalism platform.

So, if the ideas behind change is something that moves you, or if you’re just curious, take a moment and subscribe.

If you’re already here, thank you for trusting me with your attention

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You can expect posts twice a month and sometime’s more when the story demands it as I carve out more time for short and long form reporting.

In my next article, I’ll share more Behind Change Made and how I’ve been building the platform over the past three years.

If you have a lead or a story tip especially on community solutions, climate stories or cultural shifts worth paying attention to; email me at sid@changemade.co.

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It’s been some time since I’ve jumped back into the concert photo pits, but If there was one concert I had to get back in the mix for, it had to be this.

This was a moment to witness for Canadian popular culture and for XO Artist & Rapper Nav as he closed his Never Sleep Tour, bringing a sold-out show to Toronto’s Scotia Bank Arena.

If you’ve heard “Some Way,” one of Nav’s breakthrough songs with the Weeknd, then you probably know about his infamous line, “I’m the first brown boy to get it popping.”

Growing up in an era before hip-hop became mainstream and being an advocate for the culture, I saw tons of South Asian rappers & singers fight the cultural barriers of being an artist to grace all kinds of stages across the city.

Convincing family members that a career in hip hop or the arts was worth pursuing instead of the more cherished engineer, doctor or lawyer was part of almost every immigrant family narrative growing up.

Seeing the meteoric rise of Nav as a South Asian artist signed to the Weeknd’s XO label and selling out Toronto’s Scotia Bank Arena helps paves yet another path for brown artists who have the passion and see themselves contributing to the Canadian cultural scene and hip-hop movement.

You could feel that energy was alive in Scotiabank Arena for this sold-out show as we got to work documenting moments of the night. Playing to the crowd and performing some of his favourites, Nav brought the energy to keep his day one fanbase singing along across the arena.

Of the many highlights from the night, the Canadian hometown hero brought out rap legends Meek Mill & Travis Scott to give fans a special show that closes out his tour.

As I went through the thousands of images I shot from the tour finale, I can say that Nav is the king of the current South Asian wave and the future of what culture and hip-hop have always looked to embody; A movement that gives people from different walks of life a stage to perform.

As we see more South Asian artists stake their own claim in the world, Nav is someone who has truly earned his well-deserved lyrical rep of being

“The First Brown Boy To Get It Popping.”

After having the opportunity to capture this iconic Canadian cultural moment, you can also expect this brown boy 👋🏾 to get back to documenting more moments to highlight pop culture from Canada to the world.

Images shot by Sid Naidu for Complex Canada

Read the full Complex Canada concert recap article by Erik Leijon: Nav Gets His Flowers at Hometown Never Sleep Tour Closer w/Travis Scott & Meek Mill.

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From Hard Knock Beginnings

In the early stages of my entrepreneurship journey, I created a brand called Hard Knock Leadership. It was a platform where I could share my journey unapologetically by pulling from my lived experiences of growing up in marginalized communities. It was my first taste at freelancing through a brand identity that I could build from the ground up.

It allowed me to chase my passion for supporting people and building communities. It gave me purpose as a creator, changemaker and aspiring humanitarian. Without a plan or guide, I was pushed far beyond my comfort zone and learned some of the most valuable lessons through failures and successes on the road.

I strived to become the king of bounce back from many of those failures, but some of those losses hit hard, and the successes no longer felt as relevant. As the world started sharing more, I found solitude in sharing less. Imposter syndrome mixed with burnout can be a silencing drink. After stepping into an executive leadership role, I felt Hard Knock Leadership had served its purpose, so I retired from the alias to focus on a full-time career.

My hard-knock beginnings put me in a position to chase challenging roles where working became my only focus. Where I lacked experience or talent, I knew I could make up for those shortcomings by being the hardest working person in the room. I took pride in telling myself I could last the longest on the treadmill, until I could not. It was the gift and curse of inheriting a “no such thing as work-life balance” from my immigrant culture.

When I lost that career that I spent almost a decade nurturing and building due to political forces, I partially lost myself and the confidence I once commanded from being someone who always got the job done no matter what. Setbacks can make you doubt yourself and forget the purpose you once had. If you ever get here, It’s important to remember that a setback is an opportunity for you to step back and rechart your course.

The Change Made

My life has always been a constant evolution of ideas, experiences, and growth. I've tried my hand at various creative endeavours and have been fortunate to work on a number of projects that have positively impacted others. As I continue to learn and grow, I find it increasingly important to get back to documenting and sharing my experiences and knowledge.

When you are at your lowest, it’s easy to forget about all you’ve accomplished to get this far. Failing made me feel like I needed to start from scratch again and carve a new path for myself, so I did:

• I went back to school for international development and graduated with honours as someone who almost dropped out as an undergraduate student.

• I put my time back into passion projects, leading me to co-found Scarborough Made, which has grown into a recognizable community arts organization in Toronto’s East.

• I raised over 160,000 in grant funding to support creative projects and businesses after my master’s application was rejected because of my decade-old GPA.

• I started my creative firm SNCD (pronounced as the word Synced) as a full-time artist and creative entrepreneur during the pandemic to show others that it is possible to thrive in the creative economy.

Why this, Why Now?

My journey and experiences working across different industries and sectors have taught me a lot over the years. I want to share some of those insights and lessons that I’ve learned to highlight the change that’s been made.

As someone who wears a lot of hats, my work is spread across different platforms, so I wanted to create more of an open space where I can be candid about my successes, failures and everything in between, hoping that my stories and experiences will inspire and empower others to embrace their own creative paths.

Help Me Build This Community.

I envision this as more than just a personal newsletter. I see it as a way to build a supportive community of like-minded individuals and create a space which can act like a collaborative hub that asks questions and shares experiences to support people as they navigate the complexities of creativity and personal growth.

As I grow this new platform, you can expect me to share something with you once or twice a month with the goal of creating and curating new content as more people join my substack community.

Here's what you can expect by subscribing

• Personal stories from my journey as an artist & creative entrepreneur.

• Interviews with fellow creators, changemakers and entrepreneurs.

• An inside look into my unreleased creative works.

• Tips and resources to help you cultivate your path as a creative entrepreneur

• News & updates on projects I’m working on before it goes public.

I can't wait to embark on this adventure with you. If you’ve been following my work and are excited about joining me on this new platform, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting my work as a creator & changemaker.

Doing so will give you insider updates, resources and exclusive content to fuel a community of people passionate about creativity, entrepreneurship and social impact.

Subscribe now

Happy World Photography Day! 📸⁠
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I picked up the camera and started capturing images over 15 years ago. It’s allowed me to connect with so many people and places over my life and is something I’ve proudly made a freelance career out of. ⁠
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I’m sharing this image from my archives in India on World Photography Day because it reflects how I developed my craft as a documentary shooter. ⁠
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Capturing people in environments is what I love to do. For me, it reflects the world at that given moment in time. ⁠
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I’ve shot across Asia, Australia & the Americas, but it was in India where I built my connection to documenting culture & community by focusing the lens inward on my heritage. ⁠
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While I’ve worn many hats through my work, picking up the camera to document humanity and learning from other documentarians is what constantly inspires me to create.⁠
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🗒️ World Photography Day is celebrated on August 19 every year to pay homage to photographers who contributed to the fields of photography. The day is observed to encourage people to take up the art.⁠
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Looking for a reason to pick up the camera? I hope this inspires you to go create something on this day! ⁠
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#WorldPhotoDay⁠ #DocumentaryPhotography⁠ #SID⁠

Scarborough Made launched “Resilience” in 2021 as a multifaceted art project covering documentary storytelling, creative mentorship programming for youth and a public art installation at the Cedarbrae Library branch within the Scarborough Guildwood neighbourhood.

We connected with youth artist Nihtursan Elamhulan from last year’s creative mentorship program to share some insights into why he creates and how his work intersects with Scarborough.

SN: Nithursan, tell me about yourself?

NE: Born and raised in Scarborough, I’m an emerging visual storyteller, currently exploring photography as an expressive mode of communication.

NE: Growing up around many other second-generation households has helped expose me to the many cultures, art and values that Toronto has to offer. Through my creative work, I continue documenting these various topics, specifically spanning environmental themes and landscapes, community stories and local history.

SN: How do you see the Scarborough community?

NE: I see the Scarborough community as a physical representation of multiculturalism. Despite its massive size of 600,000+ community members, it somehow manages to hold on to various local identities and roots that define many people’s childhood and upbringing. Its unique blend of people, cultures, food, and more is something I haven’t seen any other part of the city capture in the same way.

SN: What about Scarborough Made excites you?

NE: Every project coming out of Scarborough Made introduces me to new stories and people from my hometown. As a creative, it is exciting to learn more about the emerging talent that Scarborough Made supports, as well as their ability to transform location spots into amazing public art installations.

SN: What impact do you hope to make through Scarborough Made?

NE: I hope this project helps others learn more about Scarborough and its residents. Scarborough is home to many people and stories, which others — even those living outside the east end — can find something to relate with. With so many initiatives, events, and organizations in Scarborough — each of them deserves a spotlight which I believe this project helps deliver in an accessible way.

SN: What do you think of when you hear “Resilience” in connection to Scarborough?

NE: People from the east end tend to always find a way to make the most of what they have. Whether it’s enduring long daily commutes, picking up a second job, or pursuing their dreams by any means necessary — finding these stories have become commonplace amongst Scarborough residents. The disadvantages some might focus on about Scarborough also happen to provide situations that highlight the adversity and the resilience of Scarborough.

SN: Tell me about the piece you worked on for the Scarborough Made “Resilience” installation?

NE: My piece will be highlighting Marvin Macaraig. He is a fellow Scarborough resident, community health promoter and Scarborough Cycles coordinator through Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services.

NE: Through my story highlighting Marvin Macaraig, I hope to spread the word about his work at Scarborough Cycles, their community hub and introduce more people to their mission around supporting sustainable and active lifestyles.

NE: Located at Lawrence & Orton Park is one of Scarborough Cycles’ locations, where community members have access to bicycles, tools, do-it-yourself repair clinics, workshops, and other available opportunities. Through his work in promoting cycling culture and waste diversion in one of the city’s designated NIAs (Neighbourhood Improvement Areas), Marvin represents the resilience that east-end residents demonstrate in ensuring a better, active, and sustainable future.

SN: Nithu, What are your favourite Scarborough Spots?

NE: Port Union Waterfront Trail, Lola Sally’s, Lucky Chinese Restaurant

Scarborough Made is a social impact project championing storytelling in Toronto’s East.

Scarborough Made launched “Resilience” in 2021 as a multifaceted art project covering documentary storytelling, creative mentorship programming for youth and a public art installation at the Cedarbrae Library branch within the Scarborough Guildwood neighbourhood.

We connected with youth artist Millicent Amurao from last year’s creative mentorship program to share some insights into why she creates and how her work intersects with Scarborough.

SN: Millicent, tell me about yourself?

MA: I’m an emerging filmmaker based in Scarborough. I am currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Studies at Ryerson University. My work is a reflection of my upbringing which focuses on sharing the untold stories from my community that capture unconventional roles and hardships of ethnocentric families.

As a Filipina artist based in Scarborough, my hope is that my viewers are able to connect to a unique narrative close to home and inspire others like me to pursue their dreams in the arts.

SN: How do you see the Scarborough community?

MA: The Scarborough community is welcoming, nurturing, and resilient. The community is so tight-knit that everyone feels like family regardless if you first met someone or you’ve known them your whole life. Growing up in Scarborough is such a unique experience that deeply connects you to the community, and in turn, becomes a huge part of your identity.

SN: What about Scarborough Made excites you?

MA: Scarborough Made has provided me with an elevated platform to tell stories that I think are worth documenting and sharing with the world. They have inspired me to explore my identity and reconnect with the parts of myself that I used to be ashamed of. With all of that said, I’m so excited to see the impact Scarborough Made will have in Toronto, Canada, and hopefully internationally! I’m also very excited to hear the feedback and the conversations from local residents about our project!!

SN: What impact do you hope to make through Scarborough Made?

MA: I hope this project empowers underserved and misrepresented communities as they see and hear the stories, and see the subjects and images that resemble their own community. I hope to see Scarborough Made expand the viewings of their work beyond Toronto, so the world can know who lives here and how we continue to thrive despite our circumstances.

SN: What do you think of when you hear “Resilience” in connection to Scarborough?

MA: I think of the families starting a new life together when I think of resilience and Scarborough.

SN: Tell me about the piece you worked on for the Scarborough Made “Resilience” installation?

MA: I am working on telling a story of a member of my community named Ifrah Nur. We explore her early experiences and the struggles she and her family faced as newcomers to Canada. Through her passion for Early Child Care, she empowers her community by engaging with the youth and providing them with the guidance and support they need to uplift themselves.

SN: Milli, what are your favourite Scarborough Spots?

Magic Noodle, Pho Metro, Nicey’s, Gerhard’s Cafe, Mr.Jerk, Agincourt Bakery

Scarborough Made is a social impact project championing storytelling in Toronto’s East.

Scarborough Made launched “Resilience” in 2021 as a multifaceted art project covering documentary storytelling, creative mentorship programming for youth and a public art installation at the Cedarbrae Library branch within the Scarborough Guildwood neighbourhood.

We connected with youth artist Ferdinand Orlain from last year’s creative mentorship program to share some insights into why he creates and how his work intersects with Scarborough.

SN: Ferdinand, tell me about yourself?

FO: I’m Ferdinand Orlain, an aspiring filmmaker/photographer from Scarborough. I grew up in Scarborough all my life as a second-generation Filipino. I went to Centennial College for Broadcasting and Film.

I want my work to be a representation of my life. I want to be unapologetically myself and show where I am from and who I am as a creator, an artist, a friend, a brother, and a kid from Scarborough.

SN: How do you see the Scarborough community?

FO: I see the Scarborough community as people who are extremely hard working and won’t stop until they achieve their goals. Also, I see a real camaraderie between us. Whenever two people in a room learn they are both from Scarborough, they gravitate toward each other and thrive in learning they are from here.

SN: What about Scarborough Made excites you?

FO: With Scarborough Made we get to share stories in the community that usually wouldn’t get told. I’m excited to see people’s voices be heard and their stories get shared.

SN: What impact do you hope to make through Scarborough Made?

FO: I hope Scarborough Made helps to remove the stigma that Scarborough is dangerous. Scarborough is a community that is rich with culture and creativity that people don’t get the chance to see.

SN: What do you think of when you hear “Resilience” in connection to Scarborough?

FO: I think of the people here first. Most people that come here are first or second-generation Canadians so we have to adapt and overcome the hardships that come with being that.

SN: Tell me about the piece you worked on for the Scarborough Made “Resilience” installation?

FO: The piece I worked on for the installation was with a community leader in the Kingston-Galloway-Orton Park area at the East Scarborough Storefront, Agnes Thompson. She shares her story of immigrating here with her kids and struggling to do so but through the help of the community, she persevered and now helps those who were in her position.

SN: Ferdi, What are your favourite Scarborough Spots?

FO: Dragon Centre, Waterfront Trail, Midland & Finch

Scarborough Made is a social impact project championing storytelling in Toronto’s East.

Scarborough Made launched “Resilience” in 2021 as a multifaceted art project covering documentary storytelling, creative mentorship programming for youth and a public art installation at the Cedarbrae Library branch within the Scarborough Guildwood neighbourhood.

We connected with youth artist Alicia Reid from last year’s creative mentorship program to share some insights into why she creates and how her work intersects with Scarborough.

SN: Alicia, tell me about yourself?

AR: My name is Alicia Reid, and I am a Jamaican-Canadian photographer and aspiring filmmaker based in Toronto. My work is inspired by the Caribbean and Toronto culture as I love sharing moments that highlight people of colour. I’ve been doing photography for five years now as I’ve captured local events and international artists from Burna Boy, Jorja Smith, Wizkid, and Ari Lennox. I started to pursue photography for the purpose of highlighting Toronto, the people, its culture, environment, and many more.

I wanted to make sure that there was a positive outlook being shown in the city, especially towards people in marginalized communities.

SN: How do you see the Scarborough community?

AR: I see the Scarborough community as family, very loving and welcoming. I love being able to go to any neighbourhood and see so much diversity and unity. Everyone has so many differences but at the same time we’re more alike than we ever imagined and being from Scarborough has brought that middle ground between all of us through our day-to-day experiences that we all relate to; commuting, eating, and just everyday creating.

SN: What about Scarborough Made excites you?

AR: Scarborough Made excites me because I love seeing people in the community do great things and have their stories being told. It’s so important to give people their flowers while they’re still here.

SN: What impact do you hope to make through Scarborough Made?

AR: The impact I hope to make through this project is to reassure people that anything is possible, especially coming from places that not many people believed in once upon a time.

SN: What do you think of when you hear “Resilience” in connection to Scarborough?

AR: When it comes to resilience, Scarborough is the true definition of it. The people in the community are very bold and unapologetically themselves, which I love and being resilient to me is being authentic without fear of judgement and being able to speak your mind, no matter what someone else has to say or think.

SN: Tell me about the piece you worked on for the Scarborough Made “Resilience” installation?

AR: The piece I will work on for the installation is the story of Seema David, A Scarborough Hero award winner and founder of 5n2.ca⁠⁠

SN: Alicia, What are your favourite Scarborough Spots?

AR: I love Wexford Plaza. There are so many nice spots around there to eat, from Captain C ice cream and cakes to Crown Pastries and also Kitchen Chicken. There’s always a good variety of different shops in that area.

Scarborough Made is a social impact project championing storytelling in Toronto’s East.

As an advocate for creative development and everything Scarborough, I’ve always believed that arts can be crucial to help build underserved neighbourhoods.

In the neighbourhoods where art is not always seen as necessary because survival takes more of a precedent, a few outliers are changing the narrative to show that the arts can be a powerful tool for change.

This summer, we caught up with mural artist Shafia Shaikh to talk to her about her journey as an artist from Scarborough and her latest public artworks, “In Our Nature,” in partnership with Mural Routes and the Cultural Hotspot Program.

SN: Shafia, tell me about your connection to Scarborough

I came here when I was eight years old, and prior to that, my family moved around a lot. I was born in India but moved to Saudia Arabia and then to Uganda. We bounced back and forth quite a bit.

After coming to Scarborough, we settled in the same house and haven’t moved since, so Scarborough has been my home for a really long time. I always joke about how Scarborough is so much my home that I would like to be buried here one day when it is my time.

When I was young, I wanted to leave Scarborough. I was always trying to go downtown to hang out, to work or escape as much as I could from Scarborough. Now I’m trying to come back here and do more.

SN: I feel that the need to leave Scarborough has been a common story for emerging artists growing up here. We had to leave to develop and broaden our horizons to see the beauty here.

I think you don’t appreciate why Scarborough is the way it is when you’re in it, and you assume that there are no resources here because that’s how Scarborough is. But after leaving and growing up, you realize there’s not a lot of resources allocated to a place that is basically its own little city; Scarborough is massive. The funding and opportunities aren’t always here because I believe it is not valued the same way as the downtown core.

The work that makes the downtown core so great is not really created by people born and raised there. It’s the people from the outside that have brought that culture in. Interestingly, people assume that the culture is there because that has always existed there. But it really comes from the outer rim, from Regent Park, from Scarborough, from Parkdale. I feel like that’s where the best pockets of the city are. That’s where Toronto’s diversity exists.

SN: Facts! That’s a compelling reflection, and everything you said really hits home for me. I want to ask you how did you get your start in the arts?

When I was in high school n Scarborough at 16, I did this youth training mentorship program with Mural routes, the co-partner for this current project. The training was in partnership with Youth Link, and it provided young people and with employment opportunities. I was one of those youth at the time, and the employment opportunity I got was mural making with Jim Bravo, a very well-known artist in the city. I was a mentee for a mural that he made in Scarborough, along with four other racialized artists. That experience shaped my perspective of public art, what community work looks like, and how it can feel. When I found that the standard career path was really unfulfilling, I turned to the opportunities that made me feel more fulfilled. Mural Routes was doing this free training program for mural arts career development. I did that program in 2017, and after graduating, that propelled me into making more murals and street art.

SN: I see that your work has a strong focus on community & Women of Colour. How did that come about?

I quickly learned that these spaces were mostly white and mostly men. Every opportunity was largely taken by the same group of artists again and again. If you look at artwork created in pockets like Chinatown and Little India, they are not created by brown or Asian artists. That was really frustrating, and I realized that I couldn’t just be doing random art. I saw that there was a gap in space access and resources. I wanted to bridge that gap, so I’ve focused my work around women of colour. Since then, this kind of expanded into other underrepresented communities, like non-binary, trans women, indigenous, black women and people who don’t have the same opportunity or space to create art.

I formulated a name to do this under, and I went with the E.W.o.C. project, an acronym for Equity for Women of Color. All my projects have been under that name, and it started with street art, but it turned into public art projects, installations, youth workshops, and street art from time to time. It’s grown quite a bit.

SN: I appreciate the journey and the focus on underrepresented communities. What’s been the inspiration for this current project that you are working on with Mural Routes.

I had always thought about a project that focused on racialized community workers, artists and mentors, specifically in Scarborough or the east end of the city. I really did not like how we recognize people in their work after they have passed. There are people who are doing incredible work now that need recognition. So when this opportunity came to create a public art project for the Year of Public Art, I knew that I wanted to spotlight women doing important work right now.

So I looked at women who are currently doing work in the city in different capacities. I wanted to have a variety of role models to spotlight, and we picked five that resonate with what felt relevant for this time. These portraits of women appear to emerge from the ground, and a layer of greenery is added to them, which erodes over time. By the end, it exposes the faces of these women coming out of green spaces. The project is called “In Our Nature” because many racialized people don’t have the same access to green spaces, even though traditionally, a lot of these communities come from cultures where they are strongly tied and rooted in nature.

SN: This year, the Scarborough Made project is exploring the theme of resilience. I wanted to ask you where do you see resilience in Scarborough?

There is this perseverance in a lot of people, especially the people who carry our communities, which a lot of the time are women or underrepresented groups. Historically, Black women have paved the way for a lot of us to do the work that we do now.

I see resilience in every person I know from Scarborough, and it’s not something you read when you meet them, but eventually, you meet their family, talk to them a little more, and it’s there.

Scarborough can be a difficult journey filled with joy and a lot of love.

It wasn’t an easy experience for the people I knew and grew up with, including my family. I see resilience in my family. I see it in my friends. I see it in random people when I meet and find out that they are from Scarborough. We start talking, and you get to feel that connection because they’ve had a very similar experience. It’s a beautiful thing to have these experiences and perspectives. It really helps you connect with other people and communities that are similar.

SN: Where will we be able to see “In Our Nature” go up?

“In Our Nature” will be housed at the Toronto Zoo, right outside the gate, so you don’t need to pay to access the installation. It will be up from September 2021 into the start of the new year. After that, we hope to have it travel to different green spaces, hopefully across the city, but largely in Scarborough, so that other people can engage in that work. It will be accompanied by signs that tell people who these incredible women are, what kind of work they do, and how you can support them.

SN: What’s something you hope to accomplish through the work that you are doing in Scarborough?

I think it’s already very apparent that we have our own subculture in arts. There are just so many different types of artists that are thriving and doing that work here. They’re just not acknowledged in the same way.

I noticed that there isn’t a lot of space for other artists who are women-identifying. Whether they were women of colour, Muslim or queer, there’s not a lot of space for them to create work and thrive. When I first started, I thought I would find an organization or a collective of women who are doing what I wanted to be doing, and I would tag along with them, and that’s it. I’d call it a day.

Because I could not find that, I had to try and create those spaces, and I don’t think they exist now either. I think it’s the young people that will come two generations from now will have this. We’re building the foundation now by planting those seeds. We’ll have to see what happens and where it goes.

SN: Shafia Shaikh’s latest work through Mural Routes and her focus through the E.W.o.C. project illustrates how the community is being built in Scarborough through the arts. It’s a powerful message to see stories that represent the communities you live come to exist on the walls or in the nature around you. It’s even more powerful to note that artists from these communities are helping champion this work.

Through the supports of programs and mentorship opportunities from community arts organizations like Mural Routes and City programs like Cultural Hotspot, we may start to see how investment into the arts can have a trickle-down effect on community resilience. Artists will come back home to build their communities if the opportunities exist. The bigger question remains around how we make the work sustainable for artists to stay here.

Scarborough is a hotspot for the arts and culture, but it hasn’t always received the support and recognition needed for artists to thrive here. Programs like Cultural Hotspot with the City of Toronto do a good job of supporting community arts projects outside the downtown core. It provides a potential solution that addresses the lack of resources and support for artists in underserved neighbourhoods by speaking directly to them.

To continue building neighbourhoods outside the downtown core, we also need to keep engaging local artists and enable them with the tools to empower their communities from Scarborough & beyond.

Scarborough Made is a social impact art project documenting stories in Toronto’s East.

Drop by the Toronto Zoo to see the “In Our Nature” project in partnership with the City of Toronto Cultural Hotspot Signature Project in partnership with Mural Routes, the E.W.O.C. Project, the Community Arts Guild and the Toronto Zoo.

Press Interview & Article by Sid Naidu (SN)

Sid Naidu is a documentary photographer, international development advocate, and Co-Founder at the Scarborough Made Project.

Photography by: Ferdinand Orlain

Ferdinand Orlain Scarborough Made youth artists supported through partnership funding with City of Toronto’s Cultural Hotspot Signature Project.

Scarborough Made Press Feature | September 2021

www.scarboroughmade.com

Interviews that explore the journey and narratives of Canadian newcomers in our current times.

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Lawrence Avenue East is home to some of Scarborough’s greatest treasures, and within this treasure box, you can now find a word mural painted by Scarborough’s very own graffiti artist and icon, Duro the Third.

You may know Duro's most recent works, the Scarborough Royalty mural that came to life at Nuit Blanche in 2019 under the curation of Ashley Mckenzie Barnes and is now also housed within Scarborough Town Centre.

Duro’s #ScarboroughMade origins as a graffiti artist hails from Midland and Lawrence, where he first made a name for himself. We got a chance to chat with Duro about his story as an artist and the current mural he’s creating at Huddle Sharespace on Lawrence Avenue East.

SN: Duro, I know you as a legendary graffiti artist hailing from Scarborough; where did the name Duro The Third come from?

My name back then was the Spanish Knight, and then in 93, my dad gave me the name El Duro, Athuro El Duro. I was like oouu I like that the hard one. It means hard in Spanish.

Then at the end of 93, I meant crazy legs and all these very famous breakdancers from the movie Beat Street. He saw my portfolio and said, and your El Duro?

I said yeah, and he goes, there’s a Duro in New York, and a Duro in France. So then I go, I guess I’m “Duro the Third,” and I liked it because in my head I heard this very snobby Englishman saying “Duro the Third” It sounded bomb. It sounded like royalty, and so I was like, OK, I like this. This is some royalty shit. I’m Duro the Third!

SN: Where did you learn and pick up graffiti as an art?

I was always doing art. I’ve been in art schools since the age of 10 for the gifted. I grew up with my cousin, and he taught me how to do graffiti. We lived in the same building at 1375 Midland Avenue. I was on the 11th floor, and he was on the 7th floor. My cousin was part of the crew known as the Graffiti Knights.

My cousin had already retired; he was going to OCAD, but I was obsessed with it, and so I started doing it. At the time, I started doing 3D letters. I was the first Canadian to do 3D letters without outlines so that it comes off the wall, something that had just been invented in New York City. I started hitting up the RT line hard overnight. I’d be there 3:00 in the morning bombing, and then I started getting famous. People were like, Who did it? Who did it?

SN: You mentioned you had some support from your high school that grew your career as a graffiti artist. That’s something usually unheard of; tell me more about how that came about?

I went to Wexford, and the art director of my school really liked me. He thought I was very ambitious and outgoing, so he gave me the school to paint.

I painted the whole school and started getting attention, so he got me other high schools to paint. From there, I started getting on the newspaper, the radio and TV interviews, and my graffiti career grew. By 95, I was massive, and then around 2001, I quit.

I just came out of retirement 5 years ago, and now I’ve gotten bigger than ever because I have a new style that I have brought to the masses called Word Walls, which is specifically created for clients to show all their services. So that’s basically my graffiti career for 32 years in a nutshell.

SN: This year, the Scarborough Made project is exploring the theme of resilience. I wanted to ask you what does resilience means to you in this current time of ours?

In the first week of covid, I lost 15,000 dollars in two jobs. That month I made no money and I was like, what am I going to do?

So I started customizing BMX bikes, and now I’m the biggest guy in the world for doing it. It led to a zillion opportunities in California, Florida and New York. I just did a custom bike for Space Jam with Warner Brothers. So the fact is you have to be multifaceted. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket.

You have to take that creativity and whatever you do, offset it to something else and start a business or make people happy doing something different. With social media, it’ll work. There were many people who pivoted during COVID that actually are now way more known for that than what they were originally known to do. So I’m glad I survived, but it’s also on my work ethic.

I worked every single day. I don’t take those days off. I’ve never had a vacation in my life. I don’t even know what that means. I take two naps, and I’m OK. When you’ve grown up on Midland & Lawrence, trust me, you want to work hard to evolve.

SN: What does it mean to have your work commissioned to go up by Scarborough businesses like Huddle Sharespace, and what do you want people to see?

It makes me happy for numerous reasons. One, they like me as a person. It’s one thing to hire someone who’s good at a job, and it’s another thing to actually like them for that.

Two, I grew up three blocks away from here. I could walk to my old house; my parents still live in Midland and Ellesmere. This has been an evolution for me because I changed my entire style to fit corporations and businesses, and it’s working. I’ve been to a bunch of working spaces downtown, and they’re not like this one. It shows is that everyone here is somewhat the same age. Everyone’s evolved and they’re bringing it back.

It’s very cool to see people are actually investing in Scarborough and not trying to be on Queen or King Street. Many people don’t get it, but people from Scarborough usually get it and now there’s a certain pride for Scarborough, which was once lacking. People are so proud when they see Scarborough represented, they are mega proud, and that’s what I want them to see.

For me, Duro’s latest word mural at Huddle Sharespace is an example of how the community is being built in Scarborough through the arts.

I see this collaboration between Duro & Huddle Sharespace championing the idea that people from Scarborough are central to leading the innovation needed to build back better in our own neighbourhoods.

Scarborough is a large contributor to Toronto’s economic and cultural development, and for a long time, we’ve lacked recognition for our contributions. It’s time we change that narrative by letting the world know how vibrant and resilient our communities truly are.

While there has often been a lack of space to provide local entrepreneurs, artists and start-ups with a home base in Scarborough, I believe Coworking spaces like Huddle can lead the charge to build and support a needed entrepreneurship ecosystem for Scarborough.

As the reopening of the province moves forward, Huddle Sharespace is getting ready to bring the community together once again, and with this new mural, Duro’s The Third’s work now hits closer to home from his roots on Lawrence Avenue East.

Scarborough Made is a social impact art project documenting stories in Toronto’s East.

Location: Huddle Sharespace

Press Interview & Article by Sid Naidu

Sid Naidu is a documentary photographer, international development advocate, and Co-Founder at the Scarborough Made Project.

Photography by: Millicent Amurao, Nithursan Elamuhilan

Millicent Amurao & Nithursan Elamuhilan are Scarborough Made youth artists supported through partnership funding with City of Toronto’s Cultural Hotspot Signature Project.

Scarborough Made Press Feature | August 2021

www.scarboroughmade.com

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