Using the Arts as a thread to sew people and thoughts together, Jessica Théroux is a painter, writer, sculptor, and textiles artist. She makes a living as a teacher and runs an artist collective in her home town of Calgary, Alberta with her husband, Rich Theroux.

Over the past 10 years she has co-hosted over 500 weekly live art events that bring hundreds of artists and art consumers together. She has co-written several books, co-created a feature length film (puppets), and is a singer, entertainer, and explorer. She is also a published poet. Her first solo publication will be later this year.

Too often, our most vocal and destructive critic is our inner self-bullying voice.

Kalyani Pardeshi is a multiple award-winning author who teaches anti-bullying techniques based on the science of how our brains work, focusing on the intangible cause of bullying instead of the tangible effects.

Despite having a successful career in finance and holding two professional designations, Kalyani felt something was amiss. She tried her hand at entrepreneurship and ran a successful online fitness business for two years, yet felt a continuing void that seemingly couldn’t be filled. The answer came when she volunteered at an anti-bullying workshop at her daughter’s school. She had an entire lifetime of experiences, learning and tools she had developed and made the choice to share her experience with others through her book Unbullied - 14 Techniques to Silence the Critics, Externally and Internally.

Her book has been recognized internationally through three awards: The Skipping Stones Honour Award, The Book Excellence Finalist Award and The Maincrest Media Winners Award. She has been interviewed by many media outlets including CTV Morning Live for Pink Shirt Day, Hollywood Times, Women’s Radio and Daughters of Change. 

Recently, we had another of our more than 150 speakers pass away. That reminds us that we, as humans, have a finite amount of time on this earth. But our ideas can continue living on, influencing others.

Does the world today feel like a bit of an improv experiment?

We live in some very volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous times (V.U.C.A. as the term was coined in the 1980s by leadership and strategy experts and subsequently adopted by the U.S. military), and that makes it exceptionally difficult to get traction on many of the very important but intractable issues in our midst. From the places where we live and work, to the political and social realm in the countries and territories we inhabit, the nature of a post-COVID VUCA world has made a mockery of countless well-laid plans.