♦

During the earlier years of my writing career, all life experiences were filed under “material” for future writing projects. This mindset helped me endure difficult times, and even the drudgery of caring for small children (which goes hand-in-hand with the joy) could be made to feel useful, as if I were collecting scraps that could one day be turned into a delicious writer’s stew.

A few years ago, during the pandemic, I recognized that all of my writing was therapeutic, including the literary writing I’d been calling my career and vocation. I did not like this idea at all. I rebelled and revolted against it, maybe because it felt exploitative, even of my own experiences (let alone everyone else with whom I am in relationship).

Lately, I’ve been feeling at peace with this discovery—that my writing is therapeutic, that I’ve practiced it with devotion out of necessity, as much as discipline. My writing has kept my head above water, while also giving me a sense of purpose and hope during dull or aimless or desperate periods of my life. Writing soothes and comforts me. Writing fiction has deepened my capacity for empathy, sharpened my curiosity to learn how others see and frame the world. Writing is a magnetic force that pulls me in its direction; yet writing has never quite become the organizing principle around which I can structure, to satisfaction, my energies and priorities. Is writing my reason for being? My purpose and calling? Or is it the practice that sustains my purpose and calling?

My life is structured around relationships. Connection is my organizing principle. I am a quiet interior person, yet I thrive on sharing experiences with others.

I recently did a time audit, tracking the minutiae of my activities throughout a week (valuable, because so much of my time is “unstructured,” at present). First, I noticed that I spend a lot of time being with others, focusing on the needs of others (and that this brings meaning to my days). The flip-side is that I spend a lot of time in self-oriented activities—going to the gym, writing and journaling, quiet time alone, walks with friends. Focus on self; focus on others. Fill the cup; pour it out. Experience; process the experience. Action; reflection. Sometimes there is overlap between these circles—for example, biking on an errand feeds my spirit while the errand may benefit someone else; a walk with a friend can be both an experience and a processing of experiences.

One more observation: I spend very little time “working,” when work is defined as as an exchange of one’s time and skills for commensurate financial gain in the form of salary or paycheque, benefits, pension, etc. When someone asks “What do you do?” they generally mean “What do you do for a living?” And for this, my time audit showed very clearly, I have no good answer. I’ve been writing poems all spring; does that count? I also spend a lot of time looking after my dad right now, trying to understand his needs as they change, keeping my siblings and wider family in the loop, connected, feeling togetherness, mutually supported. Is this work? It’s just life, isn’t it?

♦

When my kids were little, I stayed home to look after them for close to a decade (while trying to find time to write). This was a hard time, in many ways, for many of the same reasons that now is a hard time, in my life. “What do you do?” I’m a writer, I would have said then; or not, depending on how confident I felt in that identity on a given day or hour. 

Twenty years ago, I was writing poems too.

They’re in a stack of books and projects beside me now—a manuscript titled “Famous Love Story,” which was never published in full, and did not earn me a living, though it probably kept me sane and grounded. Reading those poems now returns me to the tones and textures and chaotic/serene inner life of early motherhood. (As in the photos above and below, when I was the mother of a six-month-old infant.)

♦

Maybe poems belong to this strange between-time, when my identity feels threadbare outside of my relationships—mother, daughter, sister, spouse, friend. Thank heavens for friendships, the landing spot for safe ranting and commisseration and truth-telling and kindness. (Not that there isn’t respite and kindness and ranting inside those other relationships too, but friends are a different category of caring and reciprocity; side note, just finished reading The Weekend, by Charlotte Wood, and now I want to write a book about friends—maybe in twenty years or so!)

So. Poems. Self/Other. Making meaning, meaning-making.

Is my CV an incoherent tangle of part-time, contract, volunteer, temporary job-jobs? Or is it a fascinating but partial record of a person who has been a steady, creative, connective presence in the life of her family, for which there is no job title, no description shorter than a novel, and for now at least, no particular beginning or end? Probably both. That’s life.

xo, Carrie

When nonprofit organizations decide it’s time to do strategic planning, the next question is often not whether to plan, but how. Should we do this ourselves using templates, online tools, and AI? Or is this a moment where external facilitation makes sense?

This is an increasingly common question. Nonprofits are under real capacity pressure, and the rise of AI has made it possible to draft, summarize, and organize information faster than ever before. Used well, these tools can be genuinely helpful.

However, strategic planning is not just a writing exercise. At its core, it is a governance and alignment process. It’s relational – and that’s hard to do well without experienced facilitation.

There is no question that AI and online planning tools can reduce friction in parts of the strategic planning process.

They are particularly helpful when the work is mechanical or synthesis‑heavy: organizing notes from consultations, summarizing themes from surveys, drafting early versions of language, or turning rough ideas into something a group can react to. For teams facing a blank page, that alone can be a relief.

AI is also useful for generating options — alternate framings, possible priorities, or draft agendas — which can help groups move more quickly into discussion. In this sense, AI can speed up the preparatory work of planning and lower the barrier to getting started. Where nonprofits often get stuck is assuming that speed and structure are the same thing as strategy.

Read about how Capacity Canada has been using AI here.

Strategic planning asks groups to make real choices: what to focus on, what to stop doing, and what trade‑offs they are willing to live with. Those choices are rarely neutral. They surface differences in perspective between board and staff. They bring power dynamics into the room. They expose tensions that may have been manageable when left unspoken, but become harder to avoid once the future is on the table.

This is where AI and templates tend to fall short. Not because they are poorly designed, but because they cannot read a room, notice what is being avoided, or help a group work through disagreement productively. They can hold content, but they cannot hold relationships.

Without skilled facilitation, many do‑it‑yourself planning efforts quietly collapse into list‑making: long sets of priorities, broad goals, and language that everyone can agree with precisely because it doesn’t force hard decisions. The result is often a plan that feels fine to approve, but does little to change how decisions are made afterward.

External facilitation is often framed as a way to “manage complexity” or “keep things on track.” That’s part of it — but it’s not the whole story.

Strategic planning is one of the few times when board members and senior leadership are asked to slow down together and think beyond immediate pressures. When facilitated well, the process itself becomes a shared experience that builds trust, common language, and a clearer understanding of roles. It can be a valuable team-building activity.

This is especially true when boards are expected to genuinely own the strategic direction, rather than simply approve a document developed elsewhere. External facilitation can help boards engage as stewards of the future, while allowing staff to participate without having to manage the dynamics of the room.

In many cases, doing this work off‑site adds another layer of value. A change of environment — even a modest one — helps people step out of habitual roles and signals that this is not just another meeting. It creates space for more honest, forward‑looking conversation and reinforces that strategic planning is different from day‑to‑day problem‑solving.

For many nonprofits, the most effective approach is not choosing between AI and facilitation, but combining them intentionally.

AI and templates can be used to draft, summarize, and organize inputs efficiently. External facilitation can then focus on the parts of the process that matter most: framing the right questions, navigating trade‑offs, supporting governance alignment, and ensuring the plan is something people actually use.

This hybrid approach respects real capacity constraints without sacrificing the relational and decision‑making work that gives strategic planning its value.

Before choosing a path, it can help to ask one grounded question:

What decisions do we need help making — and what would happen if we got them wrong?

If the answer involves high stakes, unresolved tension, significant change, or the need for genuine board‑staff alignment, experienced facilitation is usually worth the investment. If the work is primarily about organizing information or refining language, tools and AI may be enough.

Strategic planning is not about finding the perfect resource. It is about creating the conditions for clearer thinking, better decisions, and stronger alignment over time.

AI can accelerate parts of that work, and nonprofits should absolutely use it where it helps. But the parts of strategic planning that involve governance, trust, and shared ownership are still places where human facilitation and experience make a meaningful difference.

When used thoughtfully, strategic planning becomes not just a document, but a moment of reset — for direction, for relationships, and for how an organization chooses to move forward together.

If your organization is looking for help with facilitating the strategic planning process, please reach out to Capacity Canada. Capacity Canada supports nonprofit organizations through strategic planning and capacity‑building processes grounded in realism, shared ownership, and the lived realities of nonprofit leadership. Read more here.

The post Strategic Planning Resources for Nonprofits: When to Use Tools + AI — and When to Bring in External Facilitation appeared first on Capacity Canada.

The Wilmot Land Grab

The Waterloo Region Water Crisis

The Elmira Water Crisis

Failure to honestly advise the public re: Uniroyal 

Failure to honestly advise the public re: Ciba-Geigy, Cnd. General Tower

Failure to honestly advise the public re: Northstar Aerospace & the Bishop St. community

Failure to honestly advise the public re: TCE & the Middleton Wellfield

Failure to honestly advise the public re: Breslube and Safety-Kleen 

That's enough for now for you to understand the problem. They were very late to the party to protect our groundwater supplies in 1989-90 in Elmira and elsewhere. They didn't even have a single hydrogeologist on staff for Pete's sake. Since then they have consistently insulated, protected and covered up each and every dirty polluter within the Region of Waterloo. They are far too beholden to our local businesses and industries including those doing major harm to both our environment and to our residents. 

Their dishonesty includes Non-Disclosure Agreements in order to keep the tax paying public constantly in the dark. It also includes attending public consultation forums such as in Elmira but failing to speak out publicly to denounce corporate policies that they know are inadequate at best and just plain a coverup at worst.  Their quiet presence in a sense validates the entire totally inadequate process. Their refusal to stand up and say what needs to be said loud and clear simply emboldens arrogant polluters.

I have been advised that they have in the past done good things regarding hard urban/rural boundaries limiting where development can go. They do have smart people on board but I suspect the main problem is and always has been the career politicians who call themselves regional councillors. Most are mouthpieces for the status quo, the influential and the well off. 

When I first started leading cross-functional initiatives, I thought authority came from job titles.

Come on… It seemed logical. Managers and Directors had authority. Vice Presidents had authority.

I had… an email assigning me to a program and a Jira epic.

Unfortunately, Jira does not outrank anyone.

This created a small problem. Everyone expected me to deliver the product, but nobody involved in actually delivering it worked for me. Dev teams didn’t report to me, the ISSOs didn’t report to me, Ops & Sustainment didn’t report to me. Yet somehow, if the project failed, everyone would know exactly who to blame.

I eventually learned something that every PM, TPM, and program leader discovers the hard way: Everyone expects you to deliver the project. Nobody is required to listen to you.

Welcome to managing without authority.

Where using mom’s “because I said so” as a delivery strategy has a remarkably low success rate.

When you manage large, cross-functional programs, you are likely dealing with the matrix of a brilliant, highly opinionated, and fiercely autonomous workforce.

Engineers rarely tolerate bureaucratic red tape and unrealistic vanity dates that stifle their performance. Product managers are trying to ship enough features to keep everyone happy. Quality Assurance is trying to make sure none of those features take production down. Everyone has their own drivers.

So, if you walk into a room of cross-functional stakeholders and try to command them based on some arbitrary urgency that pulls them from their focus, you’ll be met with polite nods, silence, and enough NTR status reports to make you question whether anyone is actually working on the project.

Here is the reality:

• Dev Team A can’t force Dev Team B to prioritize a dependency.
• Security can’t force Operations to create a maintenance window.
• Operations can’t force the infrastructure team to deliver capacity.
• The TPM sitting in the middle of the chaos certainly can’t force anyone to do anything.

Yet somehow projects still launch.

Roadmaps still move.

Complex systems still get built.

The people who consistently make that happen aren’t always the ones with the biggest titles. They’re the ones who learn how to create alignment before they need authority. Because the truth is simple:

If your only strategy is escalation, you’re not leading the project.

You’re forwarding emails.

One of the fastest ways to lose credibility with engineers is to micromanage their time.

We have all had (or have been — don’t worry you don’t have to raise your hand) that professional status collector:

“What’s the status for today?”

“Just checking in.”

“Circling back.”

“Following up.”

Or worse, the tyrannical PM:

“What’s taking so long?”

“Why is this ticket not done yet?”

“ah, I see you’re out of office next week…”

By the third message, the engineer is actively hiding from you on Slack. I’ve been that engineer.

The problem is that constant status requests are usually a symptom of something else: missing context.

When a TPM, PM, or manager repeatedly asks why a ticket isn’t done, they’re often trying to compensate for information they don’t have. They see a missed date. The engineer sees three production incidents, a broken dependency, and a security finding that appeared halfway through the sprint.

Most developers don’t wake up thinking, “How can I ruin the PM’s timeline today?”

They’re making tradeoffs. A production issue appeared. A dependency broke. Another team became a blocker.

Or they simply don’t understand why your deadline matters.

That’s where most leaders make a critical mistake.

They try to solve a context problem with control.

The instinct is understandable. The date is slipping, stakeholders are asking questions, and pressure is building. So we start checking in more frequently. More meetings. More status requests. More reminders.

Unfortunately, none of those things explain why the work matters.

Brilliant technical minds don’t want to be told when to ship by someone who isn’t writing the code. What they actually want is enough context to make good decisions. If they view your deadlines as arbitrary dates on a spreadsheet, they will treat them as optional.

The moment you connect work to consequences, the conversation changes.

• The Old Way (Control): “Hey, we really need the authentication endpoint completed by Tuesday’s deployment train. Let me know if you hit any blockers.”
• The New Way (Context): “If the authentication endpoint misses Tuesday’s deployment train, the localization team loses its testing window. That pushes the global launch by two weeks, delays enterprise onboarding activities, and impacts revenue tied to the release. Here’s the dependency map.”

Now we’re having a different conversation.

One is an arbitrary deadline.

The other is context via blast radius.

When engineers can see how a delay in one component affects five other teams, they usually don’t need to be managed. They start managing themselves.

They reprioritize. They collaborate. They escalate blockers earlier.

They protect the broader system because they finally understand the broader system.

You didn’t create alignment by demanding compliance. You created alignment by providing context.

People can’t align around ten different but equal priorities.

We’ve all had the super fun surprise “New initiative” meeting or email.

Leadership says it’s top priority.

Product wants more features, Engineering wants more time, Security wants more testing, and Operations wants stability. Leadership wanted it delivered yesterday.

The problem isn’t that someone is wrong. The problem is that everyone is right.

What NOT to do:

Promise speed to Leadership.
Promise scope to Product.
Promise quality to Security.
Promise flexibility to Engineering.

Before long, everything becomes Priority #1. At which point the word “priority” has lost all meaning. Every meaningful decision requires a tradeoff.

Want more features? More testing? More speed?

Something has to give.

Tradeoffs must happen. The question is whether you’re making it deliberately or discovering it accidentally three weeks before launch.

Alignment doesn’t necessarily mean getting everyone to agree either. However, it does mean everyone understands what wins when the priorities collide.

I like to title these meetings “Rock, Paper, Scissors”. Getting stakeholders together and making it clear whether we are prioritizing speed over features, or quality over speed, etc..

If speed is the priority, some scope may need to go.

If quality is the priority, the timeline may move.

If security is non-negotiable, everyone understands what that means for delivery.

People don’t need to love the decision. They need to understand the decision.

Because when priorities are unclear, every disagreement becomes a debate. When priorities are explicit, people can make good decisions without waiting for permission.

And that’s one of the most powerful forms of influence a TPM has.

Not deciding every outcome.

Making sure everyone knows how to decide when you’re not in the room.

TPM Survival Tip: Beware of the Green Lie

Month 1: 🟩 Green
"The architecture is sound."
Month 2: 🟩 Green
"We're slightly behind, but we'll catch up."
Month 3: 🟩 Green
"One dependency slipped. No major concern."
Month 4: 🟩 Green
"We've accumulated some technical debt, but it's manageable."
Month 5: 🟩 Green
"The integration testing window is getting tight."
Month 6: 🟨 Yellow
"The authentication service doesn't scale under load."
Three days later: 🟥 Red
"Everything depends on the authentication service.“

for my fellow or former SWEs:

if (projectStatus == GREEN) {
askForEvidence();
}
if (projectStatus == GREEN && launchDate < 30_days) {
askForMoreEvidence();
}

The dangerous part about the “Green Lie” is that every individual task can appear healthy while the overall initiative quietly moves toward failure.

One of the biggest shifts in my career happened when I stopped thinking like a coordinator and started thinking like an owner.

If a TPM only cares about process theater, then “Is the ticket done?” is the only question they will ask. They simply measure activity and protect the process.

If a TPM has an owner mindset, they ask, “If this ships, does it solve the problem we intended to solve?”

An owner protects the outcome by removing friction and protecting engineering time from low-value work.

This distinction matters because engineers can spot process theater from a mile away.

Nobody gets excited about updating a spreadsheet or improving a burndown chart.

People get motivated when they understand the value being created.

The best TPMs I’ve worked with weren’t obsessed with picture-perfect Agile ceremonies.

They challenged ideas that consumed resources without delivering meaningful value. That’s what owners do.

So instead of asking whether the process was followed perfectly, ask whether the outcome justified the investment.

Ironically, this mindset also makes managing without authority easier.

Engineers respect leaders who protect their time, product teams respect leaders who understand business impact, executives respect leaders who deliver predictable outcomes.

When people believe you’re optimizing for the success of the system instead of the success of your project plan, trust grows.

You’re probably thinking, “Okay, so sum it up. What’s the magic sauce?”

Let’s put it plainly: it’s communicating explicit tradeoffs, and using objective data.

Context is the difference between:

“The team said NTR, they’re working on it.”

and

“The team is working critical task X, and sustaining Y so that system Z doesn’t go down. The current resources do not have the bandwidth.”

Tradeoffs are the difference between:

“New Task A and Critical Task X are both priority and cannot slip. We need to beat the deadline if possible but we also need to add these new features to satisfy a new customer requirement within the timeframe.”

and

“New task A is higher priority than critical task X because of these downstream dependencies and reliant business outcomes. For this cycle, speed > optimization > scope.”

Data is the difference between:

“I think we’re on track.”

and

“The team averages 20 story points per sprint. We have 100 points remaining and two sprints left.”

Most cross-functional conflict exists because one of those three things is missing. People are operating with different information, priorities, and versions of reality.

Your job isn’t to force alignment. It’s to decrease ambiguity until alignment becomes the obvious choice.

TPMs with no direct reports can quietly move mountains while directors with massive organizations struggle to get alignment.

The difference isn’t their title.

It is trust.

Those TPMs consistently identified risks before they exploded, they understood the business, they made meetings shorter instead of longer, they brought data instead of opinions.

After enough iterations, something interesting happens.

People stop asking,“Who gave you authority?”

And start asking, “What do you think we should do?”

That’s the moment you’ve earned influence.

And the org chart never changed.

The Critical Skill Nobody Teaches You was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of our ongoing mission to provide simple, real-time energy monitoring solutions for homeowners and commercial customers, our development team regularly rolls out software updates to the MyEyedro cloud platform. These changes are driven by customer requests and our desire to provide continuous enhancements to the MyEyedro ecosystem.  Updated feature deployments ensure that whether you are managing electricity, water, gas, or temperature, your data is always handled with maximum speed, security, and precision.

Bookmark the MyEyedro Release Notes page to stay up-to-date on the current version of the MyEyedro software and any new features.  

♦

Zabaglione; zabaione (zah-bahl-YOH-nay) 

One of Italy’s great gifts to the rest of the world, zabaglione is an ethereal dessert made by whisking together egg yolks, wine (traditionally Sicilian Marsala) and sugar.  This whisking is done over simmering water so that the egg yolks cook as they thicken into a light, foamy custard. 

Traditional zabaglione must be made just before serving. It can be served either as a flavoured dessert by itself or as a sauce over cake, fruit, ice cream or pastry. In France it’s called sabayon, but the Italian zabaglione is much more fun to say.

Banner image/commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lime_sabayon_with_vanilla_ice_cream,_roasted_mango_and_Baba_Grand_Marnier.jpg

Check out my latest post Zabaglione! from AndrewCoppolino.com.

I just finished a round of job interviews. LeetCode screens, take-home tasks, vibe coding sessions. The whole spectrum. Here’s what I actually think about each one.

The theory behind LeetCode is defensible: a standardised problem, a time limit, a controlled environment. Everyone gets the same test. Objective. Comparable.

The practice is something else.

When I sit down to do a LeetCode screen, I don’t feel like I’m being evaluated. I feel like I’m proving I did the homework. It’s a secret handshake: a prerequisite you clear before the real conversation can start, regardless of whether inverting a binary tree has anything to do with the role.

What LeetCode actually measures is preparation. Recent, specific preparation. A senior engineer who’s shipped production systems for a decade can still fail if they haven’t practised the pattern library in the last 90 days. The format rewards the person who did the extra prep, who sat down and worked through this specific class of exercises until the shapes became familiar. If you’re preparing for it, resources like NeetCode 150 are useful because they teach the patterns, not just the answers. That’s the game: recognise the shape quickly enough, then execute under pressure.

If I’m being honest, these interviews give me the same feeling I used to get before school exams. Not fear exactly, but the sense that I’m about to be tested on how well I revised. But I also understand why companies use them. If you have thousands of applicants, LeetCode gives you a fast, standardised filter.

It’s also worth separating at-home LeetCode-style challenges from live ones. At-home challenges are harder to trust now. If the problem is self-contained and the candidate is alone, AI can solve a lot of it. That doesn’t mean everyone is cheating. It does mean the format has to account for it.

Live LeetCode has a different problem. Run badly, it becomes a memory test: have you seen this exact pattern before, and can you reproduce it while someone watches? Run better, it can at least test pattern recognition, communication, and thinking under pressure. That distinction matters.

The companies that rely on it most also have the most applicants. When you can afford high false negatives, you don’t have to fix the screen.

Take-homes start from a different premise: a realistic problem, your own environment, your own tools, no artificial time pressure. See what someone actually builds.

When I helped run interviews, we gave candidates a focused ML task that fit in a couple of hours. The submission wasn’t the verdict; it was the starting point. The follow-up session was where the real signal was. We’d ask about implementation decisions, probe the parts we found interesting, and ask them to make live changes. You find out quickly whether someone understands their own code or just assembled it.

In my opinion, that’s a well-designed take-home, though I might be biased since I helped design it at my previous company. The format depends heavily on how the task is run.

The problems are usually the same. Scope creep: “should take 3–4 hours” becomes a weekend. Asymmetry: the candidate invests serious time with no guarantee of feedback. Gaming: without time pressure, candidates can over-polish the submission until it stops reflecting how they actually work.

There’s also a structural issue worth naming: the ask is unevenly distributed. A take-home is easier to absorb if you’re between jobs, have quiet evenings, or can spend a weekend polishing. It’s much harder if you’re currently employed, caring for someone, or already squeezed for time.

So the same format can reveal very different things depending on how it’s run. Sometimes the signal is engineering judgment. Sometimes it’s mixed with everything around the candidate’s life.

The newest format: you write code while thinking aloud, often with AI tools available, with an interviewer who participates rather than just observes. The focus shifts from “did you solve it?” to “how do you think while solving it?”

LeetCode and take-homes are established formats. Vibe coding is not. The edges are still fuzzy: different companies are using the same label for very different interviews.

The two vibe coding interviews I did in this round were very different, which is part of why the format is hard to talk about cleanly.

One was a concrete spec-to-implementation task. I could use my own AI setup, so I used opencode and prompted it to clarify the plan before building. After the code was generated, the interview shifted into review: understand what was built, explain decisions, and compare tradeoffs.

The other was much more abstract: take a loose product prompt and turn it into something working. Again, the useful part was not just asking the model to generate code, but forcing clarification first. By the end, I had a rough prototype in a stack I would not normally choose, followed by a short discussion about what I would do next.

The interesting shift is not that code stops mattering. It is that code alone tells the interviewer less. If the model can generate a plausible implementation, the signal moves to everything around it: how you frame the problem, how you constrain the tool, how you test the output, and whether you understand the tradeoffs.

Traditional live coding puts a lot of weight on retrieval: can you remember the syntax, the pattern, the data structure, the trick? AI changes the value of that memory test. The scarce skill is no longer retrieving the first plausible answer. It is validating whether that answer is right.

Prompting is not just a shortcut here. The prompt becomes part of the signal. A vague prompt usually means vague thinking. A good prompt shows that you can decompose the problem, state constraints, and force clarification before generating code.

AI can make shallow understanding more visible, not less. If you accept the first answer and cannot explain it, the follow-up questions expose that quickly. The tool can generate code, but it cannot give you ownership of the code.

There is one advantage across both versions: shallow understanding is harder to hide. You can’t prepare a polished artifact in advance. You can’t memorise the pattern for this problem type. You have to think in real time, with someone watching how you think.

But it is not neutral. Vibe coding rewards people who have already built the muscle. The developer with the maxed-out subscriptions, a tuned local setup, a library of prompts, and reusable skills for every common task is going to move faster than someone opening the tool for the first time.

I’m not sure that advantage is automatically unfair. Knowing how to use the tools well is becoming part of the job. If someone has learned how to decompose a problem, constrain the model, review its output, and recover when it goes wrong, that is real engineering judgment.

There is a real preparation gap here. Someone who has spent months building prompts, skills, and workflows will look much stronger than someone using the tool cold. That is not obviously different from LeetCode rewarding someone who spent months grinding patterns. The uncomfortable difference is cost: LeetCode practice is mostly free; serious AI-tool fluency often is not. Someone unemployed or earlier in their career may not have the same setup, even if they have the same underlying ability. So the advantage might be signal. It might also be privilege. Most interviews don’t separate those cleanly.

Companies haven’t converged on a standard and the variance is wide enough to be its own signal. I looked around at public candidate reports, interview prep posts, and discussions from people who had recently gone through these loops. I wouldn’t treat any of this as official policy, but the patterns are useful.

Shopify is one of the most AI-forward examples I found. According to Hello Interview’s write-up, candidates can expect AI-enabled coding rounds where using AI is part of the exercise, not a violation of it. Catching the model’s mistakes is part of what they’re evaluating.

Meta has also moved in this direction. Hello Interview describes repo-scale tasks with AI available, and 404 Media reported that Meta would let candidates use AI during coding tests. That’s a meaningful statement about what they think the job is now.

One Google-focused community interview guide had the most explicit rubric I found. It frames the work around decomposing problems into modular prompts, encoding constraints before generating anything, validating output rather than accepting it, and diagnosing when a failure is in the prompt vs the code. That’s actually a coherent theory of AI-era engineering judgment.

Stripe has reportedly added an AI programming exercise in HackerRank, with a built-in AI chat window. The reported task is spec-heavy, multi-part, and hard to finish by hand in the time available. The controlled environment matters: candidates get access to the same model and the same tool surface, instead of bringing whatever paid setup they already use. From candidate accounts, the signal is less “can you code this from scratch?” and more “can you read the spec quickly, guide the AI, review its output, add tests, catch edge cases, and explain your reasoning under pressure?”

Amazon has reports pointing in the same direction. In one Reddit thread, a candidate said their recruiter offered an AI-assisted coding round and reimbursement for the tool, reportedly up to $100. Another commenter said they had done the round using Cursor and were reimbursed. That doesn’t mean the whole loop has changed, but it does show how quickly the norms are moving.

The pattern: companies are not moving in one clean direction. Some are building AI into the interview environment. Some are allowing candidates to bring tools. Some are still closer to traditional coding screens. Big tech is fragmenting by role, team, and probably recruiter guidance.

The issue is not that every company needs the same evaluation. They don’t. A company hiring for product prototyping should look for different signals than one hiring for infrastructure work. The problem is when the interview has no explicit criteria at all.

Without criteria, “good vibes” starts doing the assessment. That’s just bias with a friendlier name.

Tooling also complicates the signal. A controlled environment makes access more equal, but it may hide how someone actually works. Letting candidates bring their own setup is more realistic, but it also rewards people who have had the time and money to build one.

A good vibe coding interview makes the competencies explicit upfront. Not “write some code with AI and we’ll see how it goes,” but “we’re watching how you decompose, how you constrain, and how you validate.” The difference between that and the average version is the difference between a signal and a vibe.

A realistic, feature-sized problem. Not algorithmic puzzles, but rather something closer to actual day-to-day work. Done collaboratively, with the interviewer as a participant. Time-boxed, but not in a way that creates artificial panic. Followed by a conversation about the decisions, not just the code.

That’s a well-run vibe coding interview with a clear rubric. It captures what the other formats are reaching for, without most of the distortions.

The harder truth: this doesn’t scale easily, which is why most companies won’t do it. And scale tends to win over signal in hiring.

What’s been your experience across these formats?

Three Coding Interview Formats: And What Each One Actually Tests was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On June 16, 2026, our community gathered once again for a tradition that has grown into something much greater than an Annual General Meeting. 

House of Friendship’s Strawberry Social is a moment to pause, reflect, connect, and celebrate what we are building together. 

This year’s theme, “Building a Village – A Community That Lasts,” reminded us that none of us can do this work alone. A village is built through care, through compassion, and through people who choose to show up for one another. 

This year, that village was felt in every corner of the room.

There was an unmistakable sense of connection in the room. Supporters, partners, staff, volunteers, and community members came together, united by a shared belief in creating a stronger, more compassionate Waterloo Region. 

Throughout the afternoon, we saw what building a village truly looks like in action. 

We heard from Janine Vidal, whose journey with House of Friendship has come full circle. What began as support for her family became a pathway into leadership. Today, she walks alongside others as they rebuild their own lives. 

Her story is a powerful reminder that change often begins with one connection — one person who listens, who supports, who helps you take the next step forward. 

We also celebrated the incredible young leaders from our Boys in Leadership program and Youth Smile-Link.

These youth are not waiting for the future to arrive, they are shaping it right now. 

One of the most meaningful moments of the day was sharing progress on Friendship Village — a new supportive and affordable housing community opening later this year in downtown Kitchener. 

When complete, Friendship Village will include: 

• 100 units of supportive housing in Phase One 

• 70 additional affordable units in Phase Two 

But more than that, it represents a new way forward. A place where housing is just the beginning. Where care, connection, and community are built into everyday life. 

Friendship Village is designed so that individuals can move forward at their own pace, with the supports they need, while staying connected to the relationships that help them thrive. 

Belonging is not something people should have to leave behind as they heal.

During the event, we launched a new initiative: 
Welcome Home: Friendship Village 

This campaign invites our community to help furnish each unit within Friendship Village, ensuring that every resident arrives not just to housing, but to a space that feels like home. 

A bed. A table. A place to sit. 
These simple things carry deep meaning. 

They say:  

You are welcome here. 
You are cared for. 
You belong. 

This is an opportunity for our community to come together in a tangible and meaningful way, to prepare a space for someone they may never meet, but whose life they will directly impact. 

We are deeply grateful to everyone who joined us — to our sponsors, donors, community partners, volunteers, and staff. 

Your support makes this work possible. We are so grateful to be building this community with you. 

Because of you, more people in Waterloo Region will find a place where they can belong, a place where they can rebuild, a place they can finally call home.

Explore More 

• Watch the full presentation: Link 

• View event photos: Link

• Learn about Friendship Village: Friendship Village – House Of Friendship 

• Support Welcome Home: Gift Catalogue – House Of Friendship 

The post Strawberry Social 2026: Building a Village That Lasts appeared first on House Of Friendship.

Well there are a few reasons. Firstly I know how difficult it is to remove contamination from both soils and groundwater once it is there. I have been following very closely the unsuccessful efforts here in Elmira for the last 36 years. If talk and bull were cleanup they'd have been done many years ago. The so called cleanup efforts to the best of my knowledge in and around the Safety-Kleen site in Breslau have not been even 5% of the efforts, cleanup and pumping done both on the Uniroyal site as well as those done directly below ground in Elmira. 

I have seen and read past groundwater monitoring reports done on the east side of the Grand River, between Safety-Kleen's operations and the Grand River. A large part of this area was and maybe still is owned by Forwell Gravell. These monitoring wells are not solely shallow groundwater but also deeper groundwater in which the nearby pumping wells are screened. Lots of various solvents are present presumably from earlier efforts to bring in dirty oil for recycling that unfortunately contained these solvents whether unintentionally or intentionally in order to get rid of them.

With my own eyes I have seen colour photographs of various excavations done on and near the Safety-Kleen site. I have seen sub-surface soil excavations of contaminated sites before whether the two Varnicolor sites in Elmira or the Uniroyal site also in Elmira. They are not a pretty picture and just like at Uniroyal, I expect that without massive on-site source removal, the site and surrounding groundwater will never be clean much less achieve even our modest drinking water standards.

Two wells for sure are on the east side of the Grand River and the rest recently mentioned in the K-W Record are on the west side of the river. However their well screens are well beneath the river bottom and pumping will easily draw water from the contaminated side, under the river and into the wells.   

All of this combined with the likely Mickey Mouse upcoming Environmental Assessment will make for very bad quality drinking water. Bon appetit !

Please contact Eyedro Sales for more information: 

Here are three reasons why an Eyedro LoRa energy meter is highly beneficial:

• Deep Signal Penetration Through Dense Building Obstacles: Commercial electrical panels are frequently isolated in reinforced concrete basements, subterranean utility vaults, or heavy-machinery rooms where standard WiFi signals cannot penetrate. LoRa operates on sub-GHz frequencies, allowing real-time telemetry  to cleanly slice through structural barriers and transmit securely over long distances without network dropouts.

• Massive Coverage Area with Drastically Reduced Infrastructure Costs: Running miles of industrial Ethernet cabling or installing dozens of expensive enterprise WiFi repeaters across a sprawling facility is cost-prohibitive. A single LoRa gateway can support numerous nodes over a wide footprint, enabling seamless, wireless data aggregation from all your submeters back to the cloud via the MyEyedro Pro software license ecosystem.

• Zero Crowding or Interference on Corporate IT Networks: Traditional wireless hardware can congest enterprise Wi-Fi bands, creating bandwidth constraints and cybersecurity vetting roadblocks with corporate IT departments. LoRa utilizes an isolated, low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) architecture, ensuring that your real-time utility tracking remains secure, self-contained, and completely non-disruptive to existing corporate network operations.

Options champions and celebrates the sexual health of all people in BC by supporting, providing, and promoting inclusive and accessible health care and education.

Based in British Columbia, Options for Sexual Health (Options) is Canada’s largest non- profit provider of sexual health services in Canada. We operate through clinics, community engagement and education programs, and the Sex Sense information and referral service.

Options seeks to provide comprehensive and accurate information, support for sexual expression and reproductive choice, and confidential clinical services that help British Columbians enjoy healthy sexuality throughout life.

We acknowledge that Options for Sexual Health operates across the homelands of the more than 198 First Nations and 30 Métis charter communities throughout the province.

We are currently seeking up to 4 new members to serve on Options’ governance-focused Board of Directors. The Board’s role is to lead and guide Options in achieving its mission, vision and strategic priorities. The Board helps determine how Options makes a difference for British Columbians: what good, for which need, for whom, at what cost, and how ethically.

In particular, the role of the Board is to:

• Foster connections between Options, its members, and the community at large
• Oversee governing policies that guide the organization in:
  • Future and Strategic Planning
  • Organizational Outcomes
  • The Board-Executive Director Relationship
  • Governance processes
• Ensure adherence to applicable laws and regulations
• Make decisions about financial management, risk management and resource management
• Evaluate the performance of both the Executive Director and Board.

Volunteer six to ten hours a month. This will include attending in-person and virtual board and committee meetings, preparing for meetings, and attending special events. Most in-person commitments are in Vancouver, and any travel expenses will be reimbursed.

We want people who are committed and care! We have a lot of great people on the Board already and need to add a few more people with particular characteristics and skillsets.

The following are considered key qualifications for the Board Directors:

• A demonstrated commitment to the organization’s mission, vision, values and strategic directions
• Knowledge of the various types of communities and clients Options serves
• A commitment to serve the first full 2-year term
• Being simultaneously kind, and your own kind of rad

Experience in a mid- to large-sized organization or serving on a Board of Directors is also considered an asset.

Specific skills we are currently seeking include:

• Financial Management (CGA/CPA preferred)
• Strong connections with leaders in the business community
• Communications
• Entrepreneurship
• Fundraising

We invite applications from anyone who may contribute to furthering the mission of Options, and especially those who represent groups we serve.

We especially encourage applications from individuals who are:

• Living in rural and remote communities
• Youth (under 25)
• Older adults (over 65)
• 2SLGBTQIA+
• Indigenous
• Black and/or people of colour
• People with disabilities
• Members of other marginalized populations (e.g. temporary residents, low socio-economic status)

We invite you to self-identify and link to the work of Options within your application materials.

To express your interest in joining the Options board, please email executivedirector@optbc.org with your resume and a letter outlining why you are interested and are a good match. If you do not have a resume, a letter (or email) is fine.

The post Options appeared first on Capacity Canada.

Why is anybody surprised anymore by Donald Trump's behaviour? He has an extremely recently signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran which firstly I'm sure he has a copy of in English and secondly so does the rest of the world and it says that hostilities must end in Lebanon.  Now maybe Trump's first stupidity was agreeing to something he maybe can't deliver namely Israel stepping back from it's hostile activities in Lebanon. Regardless the twit signed it.

Then as Israel continues pounding Lebanon, Iran as promised sends some missiles over to Israel to remind them about the MOU which granted they have not signed. Then Trump who at least used to have access to the best and brightest brains in America not only threatens the country of Iran with further attacks but he goes so far as to suggest  that the Iranian leaders and emissaries present at the negotiations in Switzerland should behave or they might not make it back home to Iran. Holy crap what an assh#ole Trump is. He only recently invaded a sovereign country (Venezuela) and kidnapped their President and under his command the U.S. has actually bombed Iran in the past DURING peace negotiations. He has also threatened the sovereignty of Cuba, Greenland (Denmark) and Canada.

Assuming that at one time he was sane and rational, it appears that  those days are long gone. There are mechanisms for America to remove a President who has become incapacitated whether by age, physical health, mental health or even by criminal behavior. That time is now due before he singlehandedly starts World War Three.    

♦

In a few short months, people in our community will leave homelessness behind by moving into Friendship Village!

The first phase of this project, still under construction in downtown Kitchener, will provide housing and healthcare supports for 100 residents, providing a new pathway out of homelessness for people in our community. A second, later phase, will provide additional housing for 70 community members.

Residents will have their own apartments, along with one-on-one support from staff, and access to health care, mental health, and addiction support to help them rebuild and stabilize their lives.

The new building will also have recreational programming and common spaces, to build community and connection – crucial after the many losses they’ve experienced while homeless.

Friendship Village will build on the lessons learned in ShelterCare, providing a range of supports to help residents grow more independent. Residents will have the chance to relearn critical life skills like cooking, cleaning and doing laundry, and become part of a larger community again.

“By providing this tailored support to the residents in Friendship Village, we are helping them get stronger and healthier, so that they can reclaim their lives and one day, move on to greater independence and stability,” said Tracey-Shonk-Lacey, House of Friendship Program Director. “This is so much more than a new building – it’s a way forward in our community’s journey to find solutions to homelessness.”

Construction on Friendship Village will continue into the fall, with the first residents expected to move in later this year.

YOU can be part of Friendship Village! Your generous gift today will help provide housing, support and more for people who are struggling with homelessness.

♦

Donate TODAY!

The post Get Ready for Friendship Village appeared first on House Of Friendship.

The first time my pipeline failed, I assumed I had made some tiny mistake.

A wrong parameter. A missing library. Maybe I forgot to update a path somewhere.

I genuinely thought it would take ten minutes to fix.

It took almost two days. And honestly, I’m still not completely sure I fixed the right thing. The results looked better after. Whether that means I actually solved it, I couldn’t tell you.

Before my internship, most of my experience came from coursework and tutorials where the datasets were clean, and the instructions were clear. You download the data, train the model, get a result, write a report, and move on.

Real-world data doesn’t work like that.

Things break for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious. One preprocessing mistake quietly ruins everything downstream, and you won’t notice until three steps later when nothing adds up. At one point, I had so many temporary print statements scattered through my code that reading the output became its own separate problem.

And the error messages almost never point to the actual issue. I don’t know why I kept trusting them.

I remember one evening - it was late, probably past 5, I had a half-eaten sandwich next to me that I kept meaning to throw away - staring at outputs that made absolutely no sense.

Not slightly wrong. Completely wrong.

The kind of wrong that makes you wonder if you’re even looking at the correct file.

After hours of checking things, I was fairly confident weren’t the problem, I eventually traced the issue back to something in the preprocessing step. Something I had glossed over because it seemed too small to matter. I had spent most of the day looking in the entirely wrong place.

That’s when I started understanding that debugging isn’t really about finding errors.

It’s about finding assumptions.

AI research is full of assumptions.

You assume the data is fine. That the labels make sense. You assume the model is the problem, then you assume it isn’t, then you’re not really sure what you’re testing anymore. Most of the time, you’re just trying to figure out which assumption quietly betrayed you three hours ago.

I probably reran the same experiment more times than was strictly necessary because I kept hoping the next result would somehow make more sense than the last one. Sometimes it did. Usually, it didn’t.

A surprising amount of debugging is just staring at numbers until one of them looks slightly suspicious.

What surprised me most wasn’t how complicated the models were. It was how much time went into everything around them.

Reading documentation. Checking outputs. Verifying whether something actually improved or just got lucky on that particular run. Trying to figure out whether a result was meaningful or whether I had accidentally introduced a different problem while fixing the first one.

There’s one issue I ran into mid-internship that I still haven’t fully explained. I worked around it. It hasn’t come back. I’ve decided not to think about it too hard.

One bug disappeared completely after a restart, and I still don’t know why.

I used to think strong programmers were people who wrote complicated code quickly.

I don’t think that anymore.

Strong engineers are people who stay calm when nothing is working. Because sooner or later, something always stops working. You spend hours debugging and find a mistake that takes five seconds to fix. Or the fix doesn’t fix anything. Or you solve one problem and immediately discover two more you hadn’t noticed before.

I wish I could say I had a systematic debugging process. Most of the time it looked more like controlled panic with occasional breaks.

Sometimes the only thing that changed between failure and success was stepping away and looking at it again the next morning with slightly less frustration.

There were days I questioned everything.

The code. The dataset. My implementation. My understanding of what I was even trying to do.

During meetings, I’d sometimes listen to people discuss problems I hadn’t even considered yet. Eventually, I started to realize most people were figuring things out as they went, too. They just didn’t narrate the confusion out loud.

Nobody is debugging for hours because everything is going well.

At some point, without really realizing it, I stopped worrying so much about looking like I knew what I was doing.

I started asking more questions. Dumber questions. The kind I would’ve avoided before because I was worried about what they’d reveal about what I didn’t know.

It helped more than anything else I did.

Near the end of the internship, I didn’t feel like someone who had figured things out.

I had a clearer picture of how much I still didn’t understand. Which sounds discouraging, but actually felt useful. Knowing specifically what you don’t know is different from just feeling generally lost.

Some days, I left my laptop with nothing resolved. I’d come back the next morning, and something would click that hadn’t clicked the night before. That happened more than I expected.

I became less afraid of problems I couldn’t immediately solve.

AI research didn’t teach me how to have the answers.

Most days, it just taught me how to stay in the room when I didn’t.

I Thought AI Research Would Mostly Be About Coding. I Was Very Wrong. was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

♦

KITCHENER - Another day, another game where Jack Couch Park had a tough time containing the baseball.

In a game where 25 runs were scored, 19 were scored via the home run as the Barrie Baycats beat Kitchener 18-7 Sunday afternoon.

Barrie hit eight out of the park, giving them a league-leading 37 homers on the season.

Many of them were of the multi-run variety, as they ballooned their lead to 8-0 by the end of the third.

The Baycats continued to pile on the runs, only posting a zero-run inning once.

The Panthers were full marks with 14 hits, but couldn't keep up and couldn't solve Saul Vazquez with consistency.

Raffi Gross, Petey Kiefer and Josh Williams all hit solo shots, the only blemishes on what was a banner night for the visiting starting pitcher. 

Vazquez struck out nine through six innings for the win. He gave up seven hits and four runs.

The final of the four runs he was charged with was Trent Lawson coming around to score. He pinch ran for Josh Williams, who was clunked on the back to lead off the seventh.

For doing that, Vazquez was tossed from the game, and both benches even cleared for a moment.

Samuel Quintana took the loss for the Panthers. He gave up 10 runs on 10 hits, struck out five and walked two.

Malik Williams was three-for-five, while Yosvani Penalver had two hits.

Noah Hull was the big bat for Barrie, going three-for-six with two home runs and seven RBI.

Kitchener drops to 6-11 on the season, while Barrie improves to 13-4.

The Panthers don't have long to think about the loss, as Welland comes to town for a Monday night rain out make up game at 7:05 p.m.

GET YOUR TICKETS NOW and #PackTheJack!

Lore is a next-generation, open source version control system

Rust 6k Updated Jun 24

Most interns don’t fail dramatically. There’s no single blunder, no heated confrontation, no obvious red flag. They simply fade—competent on paper, forgettable in practice—and never quite understand why the return offer never comes.

That’s the quiet tragedy of it. The failure isn’t loud. It’s invisible.

After observing and working alongside dozens of interns across industries, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern: the ones who don’t make it rarely lack intelligence or technical skill. They lack professional self-awareness — the ability to see themselves as others in the organization actually see them.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

The average intern measures success by completion. Did I finish the assignment? Did I submit it on time? Check. Check.

But the professionals watching you aren’t measuring completion — they’re measuring judgment. They want to know: Does this person understand why this task exists? Can they connect their work to a larger outcome?

Example
An intern is asked to compile a competitor analysis. She delivers a clean spreadsheet, right on schedule. Another intern delivers the same spreadsheet—but opens his email with, "I noticed two of these competitors recently shifted pricing models. Wanted to flag it in case it’s relevant to the Q3 discussion.” Same task. Completely different signal.

💡Takeaway: Before submitting any piece of work, ask yourself one question—so what? If you can’t answer it, your work isn’t done yet.

Internships are structured, but real professional environments are not. The moment your last task is complete and you’re silently waiting for the next one, you’ve already lost ground.

Senior professionals are busy. They don’t have time to manage your calendar for you. When you require constant direction, you become overhead—not an asset.

Example
An intern finishes a research brief two hours before the end of the day. She sends it over, then goes quiet. Meanwhile, a team meeting is being prepped for tomorrow with no one assigned to format the presentation slides. Nobody asked her to do it. She didn’t do it. The next intern — the one who noticed the gap and asked, “Is there anything I can help with for tomorrow’s meeting?” — was offered a full-time role six months later.

💡Takeaway: Get into the habit of a daily end-of-day question: “Is there anything the team needs help with before I wrap up?” It’s a small habit. The returns are disproportionate.

Most interns approach feedback defensively—consciously or not. They nod, say “noted,” and privately decide whether they agree. The best interns do something fundamentally different: they treat every piece of feedback as a data point about how the organization thinks.

Example
A manager tells an intern his email updates are too long. The average intern shortens the next email. The exceptional intern shortens it, then asks, "Is the right format a bullet summary at the top, or do you prefer no update unless something is urgent?” He’s not just fixing the problem. He’s learning the culture.

💡Takeaway: After receiving feedback, always follow up—not to debate it, but to confirm you’ve understood it correctly: “Just to make sure I’m applying this right—would [X] be closer to what you’re looking for?" This single habit makes you memorable.

Interns often believe they’re being evaluated during formal presentations, structured reviews, or visible deliverables. They’re not wrong — but they’re only half right.

The informal moments carry enormous weight. How you behave in a meeting you weren’t expected to contribute to. Whether you introduce yourself to someone new or wait to be introduced. Whether you follow up after a coffee chat or let it dissolve into nothing.

Example
Two interns attend the same all-hands meeting. One treats it as passive information. The other sends a one-line note to the speaker afterward: “Really found your point on customer retention interesting — it changed how I’m thinking about the project I’m working on.” That’s not flattery. That’s professional engagement. The second intern is remembered. The first is not.

💡Takeaway: Treat every interaction as part of your professional record. Not with anxiety — with intention.

Technical skills get you the internship. Cultural fluency determines whether you’re asked to stay.

Every organization has an unwritten operating system—how people communicate, how decisions get made, and what’s said in meetings versus what’s said in hallways. Interns who fail to read this OS often work hard in the wrong register: too formal where the team is casual, too casual where precision is expected, too quiet when visibility matters, and too loud when listening is the real job.

💡Takeaway: Spend your first two weeks observing more than performing. Watch how your manager communicates under pressure. Notice whose opinion carries weight in a room and why. Ask yourself: “What does ‘doing a great job’ actually look like here?” —and then calibrate.

They never explicitly ask, "What would make this internship a success from your perspective?”

That question, asked in the first week, changes everything. It tells your manager you’re serious. It gives you a target. And it reframes the internship from a passive experience into an active commitment.

Most interns wait to be told. The 1 in 100 asks.

The gap between a good intern and a great one is rarely talent. It’s the willingness to think like someone who already belongs there and then prove it, quietly, every single day.

If this article helped you, share it with a friend preparing for internships or entering corporate for the first time.

And follow the ENGINEERING BEYOND CODE series for more real corporate lessons that colleges rarely teach.

• Sujata Jha | Official - Medium
• 5 reasons Why Interns Should Not Overwork Themselves To Impress Everyone
• 4 Tips To Outshine In The First Week Of Internship
• What Shocked Me Most During My First Internship

The Intern Who Did Everything Right Still Didn’t Get the Offer was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

His dickhead lawyer actually called him a national treasure AFTER he was convicted. Perhaps convicted felon is better than the truth which is that he is also a convicted felon with allegations of being a serial rapist. These most recent charges and newer victims are coming up in 2027 and just the delay alone suggests to me that he is being given every opportunity to do the honourable thing and pass on before further tarnishing his formerly grandiose reputation. I have to wonder how long he's felt the need for private security. Maybe only since he was first charged but possibly ever since his first rape...oops I mean his first consensual sex with a female who later brought charges against him.   

Neither his lawyer nor himself were immediately yelling that they would appeal the decision. Strange. Any chance that it was a negotiated deal between Stronach and the prosecutors? Something along the lines of plead guilty (and no appeal) to the most minor charges and we'll give you a pass on the many rape charges. Maybe the idea was that Stronach literally would die before the next trial was started much less completed. Perhaps his sentencing on these two convictions will shed light on the matter. 

Hopefully he will quickly lose his Order of Canada status and medal . How many of our authorities knew that he had an indecent penchant  for younger women BEFORE he was recommended and then appointed to the Order of Canada? How many other Order of Canada recipients have behaved as Frank Stronach has? I wonder if even one right wing Conservative with a strong business reputation is now looking over his shoulder and wondering if his past criminalities may yet catch up to him. 

♦

LONDON - A lopsided fourth inning turned a close high-scoring game into a blowout.

The London Majors put seven on the board in the fourth and cruised to a 19-7 win over the Kitchener Panthers Friday night at Labatt Park.

Kitchener had a 7-5 lead headed into the home half of the fourth, buoyed by home runs from Yosuke Fujie, Mateo Zeppieri and Malik Williams, taking it to starter Victor Payano.

But Bawin Colon had a tough time finding the strike zone for Kitchener, giving up seven runs (six earned) on one hit, walked three and struck two batters. 

He faced seven batters and didn't record an out.

Owen MacNeil surrendered five runs on six hits in the first three innings, before making way to Colon for the fourth.

Payano got through five, giving up seven runs (five earned) on seven hits, walking one and striking out five. 

The Majors bullpen made the difference. While the Kitchener bullpen couldn't slow London down, the Majors' pen gave up one hit in the final four innings.

Zeppieri and Josh Williams each finished with two hits. 

Malik Williams' home run was his only hit, but extended his hitting streak to nine games. He has hits in 12 of the 13 games he has played in this season.

Kitchener has been outscored 33-30 in the last two games.

The Panthers fall to 6-10 on the season. London improved to 11-4.

Kitchener is home to Barrie for Father's Day on Sunday at 2 p.m.

GET YOUR TICKETS NOW and #PackTheJack!

In operation since 1986, the Community Legal Clinic of York Region (“CLCYR”) is a non-profit organization dedicated to access to justice and poverty reduction by providing free legal services to the unrepresented. Funded by Legal Aid Ontario and York Region, the Clinic’s work includes summary legal advice, referrals, representation, public legal education, community development, and law reform initiatives. Areas covered include housing law and tenant rights, social assistance, employment law, and immigration law.

With its main office in Richmond Hill, and satellite locations in Georgina, Keswick, Maple, Markham, Newmarket, Vaughan, and Woodbridge, the CLCYR serves the largest population among the 71 non-profit legal clinics in Ontario and is the only clinic serving the York Region!

If you champion social justice and are looking for a meaningful way to give back to your community in a volunteer position that aligns with your skills, we invite you to apply to join the Board of Directors.

As a Director, you will leverage your expertise to guide the CLCYR in its mission to provide crucial legal support and advocate for access to justice for low-income and marginalized communities throughout Aurora, East Gwillimbury, Georgina, King, Markham, Newmarket, Richmond Hill, Vaughn, and Whitchurch-Stouffville.

The Board operates as a policy governance board, establishing organizational goals. Directors are responsible for setting the strategic direction of the CLCYR, overseeing the Executive Director, ensuring adequate financial resources, providing proper financial oversight, and protecting the legal and ethical integrity of the CLCYR.

Directors will serve a two-year term, with the option to seek two additional consecutive terms.

Board meetings are held on the third-to-last Thursday of each month from 7 to 9:30 PM. While most sessions are held virtually, select meetings will be held in person. Each Director is required to join one committee (e.g., Finance Committee, Policy and Governance Committee).

Directors are expected to attend all scheduled Board and committee meetings. Time commitment for this position is up to 10 hours monthly, including reviewing meeting materials, attending meetings, and email correspondence.

We seek candidates with knowledge of non-profit governance board structure, who appreciate working collaboratively in a team environment, and understand the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We are particularly interested in applicants with experience and expertise in the area of Finance, along with other skills including:

• organizational leadership
• community development and advocacy
• strategy implementation
• change management
• communications and relationship management
• risk management and/or administration
• government knowledge

For more information about the Community Legal Clinic of York Region, please visit clcyr.on.ca.

For inquiries about the recruitment process, or to request further information about the Board, please send an email to nomination@clcyr.on.ca. A Board member from the Nominations Committee will contact you.

Please submit your current resume and cover letter to nomination@clcyr.on.ca. Only those submissions sent to this email will be considered for the recruitment process. The application deadline is Sunday, July 5, 2026 at 11:59 PM.

The post Community Legal Clinic of York Region appeared first on Capacity Canada.

Together, we hit our goal of hearing from over 2000 youth for the 2026 Youth Impact Survey! ♦

We also surpassed the number of youth we heard from in 2023. ♦

This has been a community-wide effort and we couldn’t have reached this goal without everyone’s contributions. Thank you to:

• all the youth who filled out the survey
• the 13 Youth Impact Survey Ambassadors who worked with us
• the young people who helped spread the word about the survey
• the partners and organizations who promoted the survey
• everyone else who helped to make this Youth Impact Survey a success

Stay tuned for information about the prize draw, volunteer letters, and what’s next for the data.

The post 2026 Youth Impact Survey – We heard from over 2000 youth! appeared first on Children and Youth Planning Table.