Toronto born,  LA-based Caterina Scorsone prepared for her role as the brilliant but drug-addicted Dr. Amelia Shepherd on the hit television show Private Practice by spending time with members of The Good Neighbours’ Club, a Toronto day centre for older men who are homeless or marginally housed.

Her father, Dr. Bruno Scorsone, is the Executive Director at the club, and Caterina has witnessed firsthand the hope and despair of club members, some of whom, like the character she plays, are battling their way back from addiction to a better life. You can see Caterina Scorsone on the morning of December 29 on Breakfast Television Toronto where she will talk about the show, the club and how one inspired her work on the other.

The Good Neighbours’ Club is the last refuge for many. Without adequate housing, it is the one place they can turn to for showers, clothing, a place to lock up what few valuables they may have, medical care, food, companionship and compassion. It is open from 8am until 5pm, giving members somewhere safe to go in the day, away from the violence and temptations of the street.  The club makes final arrangements for the men when there is no one to do that for them.

By the time a marginally housed or homeless man is 50, he is physiologically closer to 70 in age. The stress of a nomadic life is extraordinary and in economic times such as these, and it’s only getting worse. A jobless recovery has seen more pressure on The Good Neighbours’ Club even as budgets are being cut. The desperately poor and mentally ill are being pushed into even worse circumstances even as the services that could help them are being eviscerated.

These are cruel times.

But, amidst the hardship, there are flashes of great kindness. And as bright a light as Caterina Scorsone is on screen, so is she off, and she is using her Christmas holiday to help the club. She joins a list of luminaries who this year have given so generously of their time and talents, including Citytv’s Roger Petersen, CTV News Toronto’s  Joe Tilley, Senator Art Eggleton, The Honourable Glen Murray, Sheldon Levy, Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and many others.

It is easy to look the other way. It is much harder to look in the eyes of someone in trouble and say “I see you, I know you are in pain and though it is not much, let me stand with you for this short time so you will know that you are not alone.”

Thank you to Caterina Scorsone, Roger Petersen, and everyone who has supported The Good Neighbours’ Club this year. Special thanks go to Dr. Bruno Scorsone, Dr. David Bruce, Lauro Monteiro and all the staff and support workers who give so tirelessly of themselves to help those others have forgotten.

They are all gifted, skilled people who would make so much more in the private sector, but who have chosen to live their lives in accordance with their beliefs and consciences.

We at Babble On Communications have been grateful once again this year to lend our support to this most worthy cause. We join Caterina Scorsone this Christmas in hoping you will consider making a donation to The Club at http://goodneighboursclub.org/how-you-can-help-1/how-you-can-help.html

About The Good Neighbours’ Club:

Funded largely by the United Way of Greater Toronto, the Ontario Ministry of Health and the City of Toronto, The Good Neighbours’ Club is assisted by the Daily Bread Food Bank, Second Harvest, Whole Foods Market and Torontonians who realize that these men could be their fathers, their brothers, their sons or even themselves. For more information about The Good Neighbours’ Club please visit www.goodneighboursclub.org

About Private Practice:

Created by Shonda Rhimes, the Golden Globe-winning creator of Grey’s Anatomy, comes the story of a team of gifted doctors working together to change the lives of their patients for the better as they look to one another for friendship and love. The doctors of Oceanside Wellness and Pacific Wellcare work on the most difficult cases, patients whose medical needs often pose moral and ethical dilemmas. Private Practice is executive-produced by Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, Off the Map), Betsy Beers (Grey’s Anatomy, Off the Map), Mark Gordon (The Hoax, Saving Private Ryan), Mark Tinker (St. Elsewhere, NYPD Blue), Steve Blackman and Craig Turk. Private Practice is an ABC Studios Production. For more information, please visit: http://abc.go.com/shows/private-practice

Related posts:

1. The men of The Good Neighbours’ Club give to Japan Dave Wheaton and Ray May are regular volunteers at The...
2. Reverend walks a mile in their shoes… Rev. Dr. David Bruce making 42.2 KM trek to highlight...
3. VoteSocial.ca This election, advance polls suggest young adults, aged 18-30, may...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Related posts:

1. The Trouble with Young People Today is… There is a fun blog called The Problem with Young...
2. VoteSocial.ca This election, advance polls suggest young adults, aged 18-30, may...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Mickey had been dragged to a kids event featuring popular children’s entertainers by his daughter. When he saw the kind of crowds show attracted, he thought he’d better learn more about it and see if it was a fit for his business.

Here he was, the captain of a Fortune 500. He didn’t send a marketing or PR person to check it out or cross reference pie charts with info graphs to come up with his answer. He went out, spent a nice day with his daughter, and talked to people in the crowd and involved with the event, but never as Mickey Drexler, the “merchant prince” (as he was nicknamed in the press) but just as a dad, some guy in the crowd, asking interesting questions.

Those questions resulted in him sponsoring our client’s event for the following year.  And I got to see a glimpse into how he worked and thought.

Mickey Drexler has, I believe, what Stanford University psychologist and author Carol Dweck in her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success“  calls a “growth mindset.” I say that because in my time with him, limited as it was, he was more about listening than talking, more about sharing ideas than being right. And he loved to talk with everyone — not at them, but really with them.

If you haven’t read Dweck’s book (and I recommend it highly), it contends that there are two types of people in the world: those with “fixed mindsets” and those with “growth mindsets.”

People with a growth mindset seek to always learn. They try not to see setbacks as failures or new ideas as threats. They are instead opportunities for growth and portals to new ways of doing things better.

People with “fixed mindsets” seek to blame others in the face of failure and position themselves to be right no matter what, even if it means rejecting people or ideas that can help their companies, projects or ideas. Any new way of thinking or of looking at an old problem isn’t a possibility; it’s a personal and professional affront.

The book was written five years ago or so and talks about the failures of leadership at some companies like Enron. It also looks at leaders who have turned companies around, not by knowing everything but rather, by being curious about how everything works from all the stakeholders perspectives, including those on the lowest rungs of the corporate ladder, and even from dissatisfied customers.

Leaders like that learn by NOT knowing everything and by celebrating that fact. They actively seek to see the world differently, and surround themselves with those who aren’t afraid to tell them what they probably won’t want to hear.

Really bold leaders reward dissent because they recognize that being told what they want to hear does not lead to breakthroughs or growth. Innovation and growth require awkward conversations with people who have different, sometimes contradictory ideas.

Here in Canada, we have an extraordinary social experiment called The Centre for Social Innovation, otherwise known as CSI. And yes, my American friends, we spell “center” “centre” – that’s just how we roll.  It was founded by Tonya Surman, an Ashoka Fellow and creative thinker determined to realize a better world.

CSI is premised around the idea that a shared space populated by diverse people with very different businesses, ideas and backgrounds will lead to outlandish and new ways of thinking that will better us all and maybe even solve age old problems.

Age old problems require new, radical solutions and fresh approaches. They must. Or we would have solved them by now. They require all involved to adopt a growth mentality, and to move away from a fixed mindset. Fortunately, growth mentality can be learned, and the book suggests how. But one way is by finding and learning from leaders wherever you/we can who embrace tough challenges not by relying on what they already know but by finding out what they can learn from others, even in unlikely places.

The growth mindset is essential for the longterm success of any brand, and given the state of the world right now, it may even be essential for our very survival.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

But she did go, urged on by the memory of Megan’s last days, during which time Megan asked her parents and friends to keep her work raising awareness for childhood cancer research going.

I am forever in awe of the childhood cancer families who work so hard to raise money and awareness to fight the diseases that their children battle(ed). It is agonizing and exhausting for them at times I am sure. And yet they must, because, for some, the only thing worse than sharing their story is not sharing their story.

For those in the battle, research is the only hope. A solution could come soon, perhaps in time for their child. It was only a generation ago that childhood leukemia claimed something like 80 per cent of sufferers. Now the numbers are reversed and climbing, with more than 80 per cent of those battling childhood leukemia surviving. I’ve heard the number quoted higher than 90 per cent in some circles.

These families would almost all rather be doing something else. Most are unpaid, and all are so very tired from the additional burdens that fighting childhood cancer has put on them. They are absolute heroes in my eyes.

None of this takes away from the vital work being done by professional fundraisers, marketers and public relations folks at any medical, research institution or drug company doing what they can to fight childhood cancer or any other disease for that matter. Goodness knows, I am one of them from time to time, and I have been inspired and humbled by extraordinary professionals doing everything they can to advance the cause.

But in my books, the families are heroes of the highest order. There is no profit to be made by drug companies to research certain diseases, all too often, childhood cancers. That’s not a dig. They are businesses and their responsibility in the world as it is now is to make money for their shareholders, and not to solve the world’s ills. It costs billions of dollars to create new drugs, and the money they’ll get back from creating drugs to treat certain childhood drugs won’t cover the investment. So setting up and funding research facilities has actually fallen, in some cases, to families.

Families put their exhaustion, their personal pain, their incredible fear of what might come or grief at what has already transpired aside to work for a day when no one else might endure what they have faced or face now.

And if that isn’t the mark of a hero, I don’t know what is.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Once, I brought my mother along (former head of public relations for the Metro Toronto Police), and as we were waiting in the green room of the Today Show, Meredith Vieira came out to say hi to whomever was in the greenroom. She fussed over my mother, even though, truthfully, I was the least important person in the room, which I’m sure Meredith knew.

In person, she radiates kindness and warmth in ways you don’t always see in on air hosts, often so very focused on much more important things than what PR person and her mother are in the greenroom. But not Vieira. She is very human, and in superhuman ways.

It exhausts me to think of her schedule. From galas to very early morning calls for the show, she must have so very little time for herself. Her commitment to community recently worked very much to our advantage. Our friends at The Event Group in New York were able to get her to participate in the Solving Kids Cancer Spring Gala, where Megan McNeil was honoured. Megan, you might remember, was a singer who wrote a beautiful song called The Will to Survive, and who advocated for childhood cancer awareness until she died in January at the age of 20 from the cancer she’d fought since she was 16.

Meredith Vieira is leaving to spend more time with her family. She has earned it the chance to rest and to be with the ones she loves more than anyone else in the world. I’m sure she will remain active in causes for which she cares deeply, and continue her work in new, hopefully less taxing ways.

I for one will miss her on air presence very much. And I wish her great joy as she transitions from one life to the other. She is one in a million.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

There is a fun blog called The Problem with Young People Today is. Full disclosure, I’m related to both Don Mills and his brother York.  The blog, which is frequently Freshly Pressed (chosen by WordPress as a blog of the day) and which gets a substantial amount of traffic, features the musings of an often cranky octogenarian. He rails against young people, like in this post about appropriate behaviour towards the elderly by salespeople.

Don sometimes gets into discussions with youth angry at his position. In the end, they often end up engaged by Don and sometimes even charmed.

Don often takes things to extremes for comic effect. The crafting of it is considered, intentional and meant to provoke and entertain.  It is not just some crank’s opinion. It is a mirror held up to a troubled relationship that has ever been thus: that between the young and the old.

It is the job of youth to rebel, innovate, displace, overthrow, and to challenge. And that’s what they did this past election. They held vote mobs. Yes, Rick Mercer challenged them to do it, but it’s the kids who did it. Young leaders rallied friends and fellow students and made some noise and I’d bet Rick Mercer would be the first to say that the credit should go to them.

I had the great privilege of working a little bit with Jamie Biggar of Lead Now, including on Vote Social, and with our incredibly talented, visionary and hardworking friends over at Communicopia. Jamie inspired me with his sense of purpose, his ability to mobilize and to speak clearly and plainly about his vision. He, like so many youth who stepped forth in the election, is very clearly in charge of his own destiny and envisions a better wrold that I want to work towards and live in.

I think we sometimes have a bias against the young. When young MP’s who had really meant to stand as paper candidates were elected, the backlash against them and their potential as parliamentarians was awful.

“We want more young people and women to get involved in politics, yet when they do engage, we treat them terribly,” said Paula Arab of the Calgary Herald in her article Grow up and Treat Young MP’s with Respect. The only thing worse than the contempt heaped on the candidates was that heaped on those who voted for them. I kept expecting one particularly outraged commentator to start shaking his fist at the home audience, and intone “you’ll rue the day…”

Canada belongs to single mothers and university students every bit as it belongs to political insiders and career politicians. Democracy is not solely for a single gender, a particular age bracket, income bracket, or just for people who practice a in one of a limited number of professions. It is for everyone, and it can, theoretically, witness the election of any eligible citizen, including a young one, or, in the case of this incoming parliament, several young citizens.

Young people challenge us to think differently. To think beyond our own interests. To see the world through more hopeful eyes. They are not yet entrenched in the way things have always been done. Let them look for solutions to problems that have eluded us for years.

The trouble with young people today is…they have the potential to remind us of our responsibility to future generations and the planet. And I for one don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

Related posts:

1. VoteSocial.ca This election, advance polls suggest young adults, aged 18-30, may...
2. When Bad PR Happens to Good People Most people don’t understand the amount of work and research...
3. Brandon Schupp He was one of Reader’s Digest Heroes of the Year,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

It feels counterintuitive but it is essential. Innovation and growth are not comfortable. They are not meant to be. They fluctuate between feeling like excitement and pure terror. Which is normal. But it’s only when we step outside what we believe, when we try to see our world, our brand, our lives through the eyes of someone else that we are truly capable of achieving something new and great in ourselves.

There is a wonderful story about the long serving CEO of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, who reigned at the company through much of the early/mid Twentieth Century. This is not a blanket endorsement of the man who certainly had his faults. But he did believe in the importance of dissent.

In one high level meeting when consensus had apparently been reached he said: “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here…Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

Public push back is dissent. And the public should always have a seat at any brand’s decision table. When they don’t, or when they feel they don’t, if you are important enough, they will push back. If you are unimportant, they simply won’t engage in the first place.

It may not be at the time of your choosing, or in a way that you like, but it is an opportunity to better connect with the very people you are serving or could be serving. Ask yourself the hard questions. Even if you disagree with everything your most dissatissfied customer is saying, carve out some time to see your business through their unhappy eyes.  You will discover something, whether it’s a flaw in the product or a failure to communicate something properly, or a decision you made about your customer and his or her needs in the first place.

It’s not an easy process. But it is valuable. It doesn’t come naturally to most. It doesn’t come naturally to me but it’s something I work on, inspired by my partner in crime, Mike Erskine-Kellie. A writer for television, he gets notes on what he’s written back from producers, broadcasters, story editors, etc. Some of the notes are seriously flawed. Some of them reflect a hasty read or something the note giver doesn’t understand about the series itself.

But Mike has a simple philosphy. He won’t fight any note. He will work VERY hard to see if he can make absolutely every note work. He takes it on as some kind of exciting game that allows him to stretch himself in new ways. And only when he has tried everything he can think of and it still fails will he give up on the note. But in the process, he has almost always learned something new about the show, about a character, and even about himself.

Public criticism doesn’t usually feel good. And sometimes it’s completely off base. But no matter what, it’s always an opportunity for growth for those who are willing.

Related posts:

1. When Bad PR Happens to Good People Most people don’t understand the amount of work and research...
2. The “exclusive” media story What does it mean when a media outlet tells you...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

And with the wide variety of tools now available that let people connect their message to others including the media, you accept that some – even many – will go off and try and engage the media and the rest of the world in their issue, brand or story before they’ve done the work, even before they understand the real lay of the land.

This is especially true in the social entrepreneur and not for profit space and anywhere where big-hearted people are tackling important issues, issues they can’t imagine anyone not seeing the value of.

And that’s when things go terribly wrong.

It pains me to see really good people going off on bad PR campaigns simply because they don’t know what they’re doing. “How hard could it be?,” they ask. And then they find out when not only do they not get any traction but they’ve made themselves dismissible with the very people who could have helped them. That’s when they start throwing out words like “conspiracy” and think the media is too scared to touch the story.

Nope. The truth is a whole lot more simple. A hyperbole filled blog laced with emotional slings and arrows but lacking factual evidence will get you labled as a crank, not turn you into a local hero.  A credibly presented, evidence based argument with dignified spokespeople who have poignant stories and can tell them well? That works. It’s harder to create. But well worth it in the end.

The first approach is easy, lazy even. It’s also damaging to your brand. The second takes a lot more work. But it’s effective. And authentic. And that should be the jumping off point, not where you hope to get to after you’ve burned your bridges and have to rebuild a campaign that lies in ruins.

It breaks my heart when bad PR happens to good people. It happens because they usually don’t know any better. And it can end up costing them everything they were fighting for in the first place.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This election, advance polls suggest young adults, aged 18-30, may be engaging with the political process like they haven’t in a very long time. Perhaps like never before. Why? Because they can.

Power, some say, is about cutting people off. Doctors and lawyers have a special language that takes years to learn, a way of ensuring that they remain a somewhat exclusive club. It is smart politics for political leaders to make promises to groups they think can help them, and ignore those who can’t. Those with power are the “in crowd.” Those without it are “outsiders.”

As an outsider, you stand alone looking in. And until recently, as an outsider, which at any given time is most of the population, you may have been standing shoulder to dozens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of others, just as much on the outside as you, and not really known they were there.

But social media changed all that.

Traditionally, those 30 and under have been “hard to mobilize.” You might call them an “inconvenient youth.” And like young people, women have traditionally felt marginalized in the political process and are less inclined than men to vote.

Think of all of those marginalized people standing around a glass building brightly lit on the inside and filled with the ruling class.  While it’s bright on the inside, it’s dark outside. So dark that everyone on the outside thinks they are alone. Meanwhile, those on the inside can’t see out – the bright lights have turned the windows into mirrors, so they don’t see anyone except themselves.

Social media is like a bright light going on outside the building. Suddenly, those inside are confronted by the sight of people they really didn’t know were there, just as those on the outside realize they are not alone, and they never really were. Nothing has changed but the lighting. And yet everything is different, including the balance of power.

That’s the role social media is playing in this election. Somebody turned on the outside lights.

If you want to win the people, you have to go where they are, not where they used to be or where you wish they were.

People are social. Democracy is social. And now voting is social.

Please visit Vote Social to learn how you can turn your vote into a truly social event.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So I had a great time with Bob Ezrin on Canada AM this morning. It started early, as these things do, but it must have felt earlier for Ezrin who’d flown in to Toronto late the night before. Good of him to do it, especially since it’s his birthday today (Happy Birthday Bob!).

In case you’ve been living on a Mennonite farm for the last few decades, Ezrin, who was born in Toronto, is one of Canada’s geatest gifts to the world of music, an iconic producer responsible for some truly seminal works from the rock world, including Pink Floyd’s The Wall. He has recently reunited with Alice Cooper whom he helped establish as one of the biggest stars in the world with such works as School’s Out and Welcome to my Nightmare. Ezrin is currently up for a Juno for K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag.”

Ezrin is an innovator. Someone able to read the pulse of almost anything and know what would make it better. Take the future of the music industry. Frustrated by the caliber of talent being turned out by traditional sound engineering and music business schools, he and legendary producer Garth Richardson (Nickelback, Rage Against the Machine), and teacher Kevin Williams opened Nimbus, a recording arts studio dedicated to turning out music industry professionals ready to work in the music business as it is today, not as it was.

Ezrin, Richardson and Williams are empowering a generation of recording arts professionals to take charge of their own careers, and, at the same time, they’re creating the artists, engineers and administrators they want to hire in the future. Pretty smart, huh?

Speaking of smart, Ezrin makes a pretty good GPS. Now, for the record, I am an excellent driver. I’ve never had a single accident, except for the time I accidentally drove a half ton truck over the car in a Rona parkinglot. But I digress. I’ve never seen Bob behind the wheel but I have seen his backseat driving skills, and they too are excellent. And today, they were particularly necessary as, in a show of bravada, I decided to turn off my GPS prematurely.

As anyone who has ever driven with me knows, I am directionally challenged. I once tried to go two long blocks to the mall near the house where I lived at the time and ended up in a small hamlet some 25 kilometers away. That’s just how I roll. And roll. And roll.

So when I drove past CTV without so much as a glance, despite the fact I’ve been there many, many times, Bob had this to say to me in the greenroom:

And that’s just how he rolls.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.