Hi, I'm
Daniel.

Seemed interesting, and Roy seemed like a cool, nice dude who just offered me his coat in the middle of Toronto's shitty ass weather. My father also had hearing loss, so this mattered to me personally as well.

We started texting and planning how to raise funds, and settled on spamming snack stands and running a big music night centred around hearing loss awareness. Admittedly, Roy did probably 90% of the work at first and got together a big team that comprised mostly his friends who were all older than me. By the end of the year, we had raised over $3,000 for Sunnybrook Hospital's cochlear implant R&D department.

Over the summer, I went to a STEM summer program called SHAD Canada. Great experience, but my big takeaway from that camp was that people were hella struggling to fulfill Ontario's 40-hour volunteer requirement. Coincidentally, Roy had also prefaced that he was going to be a lot busier going into his senior year with college apps and the hellfire that IB DP 2 is.

Naturally, I started thinking about the possibility of replicating everything we did at my high school, but across multiple schools. This would not only scale our impact tenfold, but also give people a chance to take on leadership roles at their school for extracurricular experience or simply earn volunteer hours.

As such, I started doing heavy outreach. I DMed every possible person I could think of through Instagram, Discord, LinkedIn, any platform, cold-messaged and got ghosted a million times, and posted graphics everywhere. I ended up with over 30 people interested in starting a chapter. Oops.

I had now dug myself into a shithole, too much food on my plate, too much to chew on, whatever other sayings are out there. But it was through this I developed the most as a leader: the whole scenario taught me how to manage and lead what was now hundreds of people across the country toward one mission. I learned how to deal with unthinkable problems that inevitably arise, how to handle conflicts between chapter heads, and how to mentor chapter heads to organize their own events, etc. I had to deal with school administrators, public officials, immature high school students, corporate HRs, and just a whole bunch of BS that you genuinely cannot even make up that came my way.

But I loved it. The busyness of maintaining a self-running system I could confidently say, "I built this shit from the ground up," was incredibly satisfying (mostly ground up; Roy built the foundation, which is the hardest part tbh). The confidence I had walking up onto any stage to present Hope For Hearing was profound. The recognition I had across the entirety of Toronto walking into any school with a chapter was crazy tuff.

In other words, I was straight aura farming precisely because of how difficult it was to start, build, scale, and maintain such a huge, complex organization.

Not only did we raise over $25,000 for charity and win over $3,500 in funding grants, but we also helped hundreds of students meet their 40-hour volunteer requirement, gave 24 chapter heads invaluable leadership experience they'll carry for the rest of their lives, and genuinely raised awareness about hearing loss. The number of conversations I had with people who had shared experiences of knowing somebody with hearing loss has permanently changed how I listen and empathize with others.

Now, as I look back on this whole experience, I realize how much Hope For Hearing has shaped me as a person, a friend, a leader, and a visionary. But at the end of the day, none of this would have happened without that one act of kindness from Roy offering me his coat that one random day. And for that, I'll be quite indebted to Roy for a long-ass time.