who am i? what am i doing with my life? should i follow everybody else’s path?… these are some of the questions i was asking myself in 1997, my final year of high school...i had no answers then but thanks to Serve Canada outreach programme i was informed of an opportunity that would allow me not to follow everybody else’s path, and that would give me at least a year to think about these questions…

i decided to follow up on that opportunity and thus in september of that year, while most of my friends were heading of to lecture halls i headed off to City Hall not fully knowing what to expect.

i don’t claim that my year at Serve was the easiest in my life but it was one of the most educational...everyday of the week i was surrounded by people that came from such diverse paths in life, people that didn’t always agree or liked each other, yet at the end of the day these people were able to look at each other and know that their work matters, that their experiences matter and that together they form a group that is able to make a tremendous amount of impact on their community…

i still talk to some of these people because over the course of the year we managed to create bonds that won’t easily be erased or forgotten...we helped each other through some hard times, and that made us stronger and hopefully more open....my work with Serve allowed me to look at my strong points and my weaknesses…

through our feedback circles i learned that feedback at its best is a constructive tool that helps you make your and others people work a little bit easier....it was at Serve, surrounded by some of the most amazing and supporting people, that i was finally ready to accept myself as a queer boi who doesn’t always have to follow everybody else’s path..