The Young Professional’s Summit presented by Rotary International on May 13, 2017 was an event with the aim to help young people realize that you can have a career but to also expose them to the opportunities to contribute back to community.

The primary goal and objective was twofold:

• To engage young professionals and hopefully get a small dedicated group to start up a unique and organic chapter of Rotary in this district
• To provide an engaging environment and opportunity for young professionals to get together and meet each other but to also actively work together on a community project

The participants were separated into two large groups where they were each given a live case to work on, one was Education Without Borders and the other, Elephanatics. These large groups were subdivided into two smaller teams. The teams were asked to work on a challenge currently being faced by the non-profits and come up with a feasible solution based on their experiences and their learnings from the Summit workshops. They then were asked to present their solutions to the different organizations.

It was an honour and a privilege to be asked to be one of the organizations to take part in the summit. The different groups brainstormed some critical and innovative solutions to our problem which we will be implementing into our strategic planning and operations.

We would like to thank Cassie Betman, an honours student at SFU and Elephanatics education facilitator, for facilitating this event. A huge thank you also goes to Sam Thiara, speaker, author, coach, educator and entrepreneur, for his guidance and compassion to helping with community causes.