Up All Night for mental health

Here at Centennial, we like to give our students real experience so they feel comfortable and ready when they leave our program and enter the workforce. It gets them used to dealing with real clients, real journalists, real vendors, real deadlines and real challenges.

Every year  our students partner with GTHA CivicAction and hone in on an issue that the not-for-profit is working on — an issue that is of great importance to the prosperity and well-being of the region. We take that subject matter — this year was mental health — and create a public awareness and advocacy campaign: as told by students.

Through the co-curricular initiative called Project Fusion, this year’s student-run, student-led initiative culminated in a 12-hour event called ‘Up All Night‘. Using the resources of first-semester PRs in their Event Management class and second semester PRs who developed the Communications Strategy and Plan, in addition to graphic arts design talent, and film and broadcast creativity, students literally pulled an all nighter. Proceeds from the evening went to the not-for-profit The Friendship Bench. The evening began with a panel discussion of experts and a workshop and was peppered with live music, live dance, laughter yoga, ping pong, improv, adult colouring books and a pancake breakfast!

But the event was not enough: students also did interviews on CP24, Breakfast Television, Global TV, CBC Here and Now, CBC Metro Morning, 680News, CBC French radio. One of our students will represent the student voice on CivicAction’s Council of Champions and in September we will install a yellow Friendship Bench here at The Story Arts Centre!

Still not enough: now, we’re winning awards. Yesterday the team of faculty and students picked up a Learning-Centred Award from Centennial College (pictured above). We pick up a couple more next week.

So if you’re looking for a program that is real, as in real work and real-ly rewarding, look no further. We’re as awesome as it gets!

— Donna, PR+CC program coordinator and faculty advisor, Project Fusion.