Community

Empowering community. Connecting community. Cross pollinating.  Citylab knows how to bring people together, often in unusual, beautiful spaces. For PhD students at Massey College, a program of evening yoga was established within the iconic, 1960s building by Canadian architect Ron Thom. For 600 elementary students living in Thorncliffe Park and the Beaches, a cultural exchange and letter writing pen pal program was designed to facilitate knowledge sharing between newly arrived immigrants living in high rise apartments and children living in a privileged neighbourhood near the waterfront. 

Yoga & Wellness Programming

Yoga and Wellness programs have been initiated by Lisa Rochon at Massey College, the Design Exchange (King and Bay), Malvern Collegiate, Regent Park, and at the Cooper Koo YMCA, where she teaches evening classes. 

Corporate Social Responsibility

Coordinating a partnership between Regent Park Women's Sewing Collective and B Yoga, Lisa is volunteering to help design direct a series of soft yoga products, such as eye pillows, ensuring skills training, minimum wage for participating seamstresses, and enhancement of brand for both B Yoga and the Regent Park Sewing Collective. 

Weaving Communities Together

The Thorncliffe-Beaches Cultural Exchange exposed young children from different cultural and economic backgrounds to each other's lives. Lisa taught basic principles of Toronto city design, the ravines that connect neighbourhoods, as well as ways to write interesting, colourful letters to exchange with pen pals. Letters were delivered between the participating schools and, at end of school term, the children were bused from Thorncliffe to picnic lunch in the Beaches to meet their pen pals for the first time.