When Alek began the Arts Education and Community Engagement program at the Story Arts Centre (Centennial College) in September 2023, they quickly noticed a surprising absence: despite the campus being home to many art-related departments, there was no space where students could engage in artistic exchange across disciplines and cultures.

Recognizing this gap, Alek reached out to classmates and initiated the formation of Arts Connect. Bringing together 11 students from diverse backgrounds, including domestic students in Canada, and others from Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, Colombia, and Nigeria, they successfully registered Arts Connect through CCSAI. What began as a student initiative has since grown into a community where creative practice is rooted in belonging and mutual support.

In the rapidly expanding field of socially engaged art, the most impactful practitioners today are not defined by individual authorship, but by their ability to cultivate accessibility, shared agency, and spaces where people feel seen. Arts Connect embodies this shift.

Decentralizing the Artistic Voice

Arts Connect recognizes what is often overlooked in academic and institutional discourse: the loneliness and fragmentation experienced by youth newly arriving in Toronto from across the world. Alek’s work begins with listening. The stories and lived experiences of students become the creative material, expressed through drawing, collaborative installation, and immersive digital media.

Through collaborative creative workshops, where community comes first and the artistic outcome emerges naturally from that foundation, Alek developed projects such as Into the Garden. In this project, students were invited to leave a message to a stranger or simply share a visual note. Alek then gathered these individual contributions and wove them together into a virtual reality artwork, transforming them into a continuum between personal narrative and public expression.

Arts Connect centers relationships among young creatives, many of them newcomers, BIPOC, and international students navigating cultural displacement and uncertainty. In this environment, creativity becomes a language for connection, not performance.

Rather than assuming the position of the sole artist, Alek creates space for collective authorship.

Trust before art. Conversation before outcome.

As a result, Arts Connect has offered dozens of students, many emerging from long periods of isolation after COVID in Toronto, or navigating life across borders as newcomers, a sense of belonging, connection, and friendship that continues well beyond graduation. For many, it became the first place on campus where they became part of a creative community.

Arts Connect has also become an important training ground for emerging artist-facilitators. Instead of waiting for instructors to arrange placements or community partnerships, students were able to practice facilitation directly with peers and community participants. Through hands-on experience, planning workshops, hosting sessions, adapting to diverse needs, and reflecting on the ethics of care in artistic spaces, they built confidence and professional readiness. Many of these students have since transitioned into roles across galleries, community arts programs, and cultural organizations in Toronto, carrying forward their commitment to inclusive, community-centered arts practice.

Arts Connect reflects Alek’s vision for cultural and art programming in Toronto: that community-based art is not extracurricular, it is infrastructure for social connection, intergenerational knowledge exchange, and cultural continuity. The recognition through Centennial College’s Dean’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Award underscores the relevance of this work.

Alek’s trajectory points toward a future where socially engaged art is not simply about producing work, but about reshaping the conditions under which people can belong, imagine, and speak for themselves.

Arts Connect was made possible through the contributions of students in the Arts Education and Community Engagement program (2023–2024), with special acknowledgement to Gabby and Tran, whose leadership was integral to the development and delivery of the initiative.