Education & Training

2001-2005: Bachelor of Communications & International Relations, University of Toronto

2007-2009: Master of Public Policy (Climate Change & Environmental Policy), University of Toronto

2014: Community Choir Leadership Training, Victoria, BC, Canada

2016: Full Voice Coach Training & Certification, Minneapolis, USA

2022: Singing Mamas Leader Training & Certification, Swindon, United Kingdom

I, like so many others, grew up believing that my voice wasn’t good enough. I carried this belief for most of my life, casting seeds of self-doubt and insecurity. It was through Community Singing that I found the medicine needed to reclaim my voice and vibrancy.

Singing was not something that I did growing up, with family or otherwise. In fact, I didn’t sing much at all until my late 20’s. I remember being told as a little girl that I couldn’t sing, by classmates at school. And so, I stopped singing for most of my life. I believed that singing was only for talented people, and that certainly I wasn’t good enough to do it.

Secretly though, I loved to sing. And like many people, I would reserve my singing moments for the shower or car, or sometimes on road trips with friends. But I never dared to join a choir, as I was terrified of auditions and believed that choirs were only for “real” singers. Which wasn’t me, I told myself. For most of my life, I carried this story that I wasn’t a singer like a badge of unworthiness.

I remember the moment when this changed. I was visiting a friend in Portland, Oregon, and I walked into a room of 100 people singing in a circle. These people were making simple and beautiful sound together, in a way that anyone could join in and participate. I didn’t need to read music, read words, or know a single thing about music theory. All I had to do was listen and repeat back what was sung.

I remember how I felt that night, as I discovered community-singing for the very first time. It was a feeling of arriving home, a deep sense of belonging and connection with this group of people who I’d never met before. It was a feeling of permission, to be exactly who I am and nothing more or less. It was a feeling of acceptance, where all parts of me were welcome. And it was a feeling of joy, to find my voice again after all those years.

That song circle in Portland was led by the great Laurence Cole, and that one night of singing unfolded into a decade of friendship and mentorship with Laurence, which I am boundlessly grateful for. Singing with Laurence has opened my heart and life in ways that I could never have imagined, and his influence has rippled out through all the song circles I’ve led over the years. Somehow, I always feel him here with me, helping to guide the way.

Over the course of that year, I kept finding myself in groups of people singing together in simple ways that anyone could do. Around campfires, at dinner parties, in the garden, even in the workplace. I remember the feeling of belonging that I had in those spaces, where all voices are welcome and everyone can sing. It didn’t matter how I sounded, it was about making something meaningful together, regardless of the quality. And you wouldn’t believe how good it sounded when we stopped caring about how good it sounded.

After that first song circle in Portland, I returned home to Hawaii, where I was living at the time, and co-founded Singing Alive on the island of Kauai. It was a 4-day gathering of around 200 people, with Community Song-leaders from the Hawaiian islands and globally. I co-held that gathering for four years with my friend Aletta, and it was my initiation into community-building through the power of song.

In 2014, I was living on the west coast and decided to enroll in the Community Choir Leadership Training program, in Victoria, British Columbia. It was a 2-week “song-leading boot camp”, where I gained many new skills and learned how to lead folks in multi-part harmony songs. I became a member of the Ubuntu Choir Network, a global community of singing groups who believe that singing is a universal birthright, and that together, regardless of musical background, we can help improve the world by joining voices in song. I returned home to Orcas Island, where I was living at the time, to start my first community choir.

A year later, I woke up one morning with an insatiable hunger to return to my hometown of Toronto, the place where I had grown up and where my family still lives. I had been away for five years, living in community settings on the west coast and Hawaii. I had a deep sense within me that my journey out west was complete, and it was time to bring my love of community singing back home to share with my place of origin.

In the fall of 2015, I returned home to Toronto and founded Sing for Joy - Toronto’s first oral tradition singing community. Those early months of Sing for Joy tested my confidence in a big way… it was often just me, my Mom, and a few other people singing together in a church basement. Ha! But I stuck with it, and by the following year, we had grown to over a hundred members.

By early 2017, Sing for Joy had become a bustling, vibrant singing community. Steph Drouin and Paul Barton came on board as Community Song-leaders, and we began to grow a team that could support a much bigger presence in Toronto. A core belief of our work was that singing together builds bridges of compassion and joy across cultural groups. I found a deep passion for working with newcomer refugees, and creating song spaces where newcomers could find a sense of community, connection, and belonging in their new home.

In 2017, I established partnerships with two refugee shelters in Toronto, with the goal of creating inter-cultural singing events with newcomers. To this day, those events are among the highlight of my life. I will never forget the hope I felt for the world, singing with a hundred or more people from all walks of life, many of whom had just arrived in Toronto as refugees in the days and weeks before. We exchanged songs from our homelands, cultures, and families. We laughed, we cried, we danced, and we found our common humanity through the power of song. At those events, I provided linguistic translation in 10 languages, to reduce barriers to participation. But truthfully, we didn’t need it. The simple act of singing together transcended culture, language, and background.

Over time, newcomers from diverse origins stepped into leadership positions within Sing for Joy, expanding our reach and creating an empowered platform for them to share and teach songs to the broader community. I am eternally grateful to my dear friends Ramah Mohamed from Syria, Hani Bashir from South Sudan, and Christine Mwende from Kenya, for all the many gifts that they brought to our community.

During those eight years of Sing for Joy, I was fortunate to host renowned song-leaders from around the world, who became teachers, mentors, and friends. Hosting Dr. Ysaye Barnwell, one of the founders of Sweet Honey in the Rock and a foremost song-leader during the Civil Rights movement, was among the highlights of my life. Her warmth, passion, wisdom, and humor was a tremendous gift to our community, and continues to ripple out to this day. Another highlight was hosting renowned Vocal Activist Melanie DeMore, another elder and wisdom-keeper in the community singing movement.

And of course, I am grateful beyond belief to have hosted Laurence Cole seven times over the years. His presence in my life has been a north star for me, guiding the way along my song-leading journey. In days like these ones, when war is breaking out and my heart is aching, I return to Laurence’s songs. His songs are like old friends tucked away in my back pocket, that I can return to again and again to find a sense of connection and wholeness when everything seems to be falling apart.

In 2018, I founded RiverSong, Canada’s first 3-day Community Singing gathering, on the shore of Georgian Bay, Ontario. My intention was to create a ‘Song Village’ for those three days of togetherness - a place where we could come together on beautiful land to sing, share, play, connect, and rest in the timelessness of the present moment. We had 120 people come to that gathering, with song circles offered by special guests Laurence Cole and Aimee Ringle, as well as folks from our singing community in Toronto.

When the pandemic started in 2020, I was a new Mother and singing groups were one of the first things to be shut down. During that time of isolation, I yearned for a song circle where I could go every week and be in nourishing community with other women and mothers. A place where I could sing, connect, recharge, and find a sense of belonging in my new role as Mom. During this time, I discovered Singing Mamas in the UK and was so inspired by their work. It awakened a deep passion within me to create something like this here at home, so I traveled to England in the summer of 2022 to take the Singing Mamas leadership training.

In 2023, I moved to Peterborough, Ontario with my partner and daughter, where I now live on the shore of the “river that beats like a heart”. I’m finding my new balance as a Mother and a Community Song-leader, moving more towards work that is sustainable for my capacity at this stage of life. I started my first Singing Mamas group in the fall here, and it’s been a slice of heaven in my week. I love being part of a global community of women, who are dedicated to supporting and empowering women’s wellbeing through singing. I have big dreams of growing Singing Mamas in Ontario and Canada, slowly over time.

My work with women has been an enduring presence in my life, and a tremendous source of passion in my work. There is an ancient magic that happens when women sing together – through the weaving of our voices, we remember our power, our rhythm, and our purpose. For time immemorial, women have gathered together to sing songs in the oral tradition – to celebrate the cycles of the moon and sun, to mark special moments in life and community, and to share in the daily gifts of tending to land, home, and earth. We all come from lineages of grandmothers who sung together in these simple ways.

Over the years, I have found so much joy and purpose in holding space for women’s singing. I was one of the original organizers of the Spirit Weavers Gathering in California/Oregon, a women’s ancestral skillshare gathering where I seeded a culture of community-singing that continues to this day. For eight years, I’ve been teaching my Reclaim Your Voice workshop for women, which was born out of my mentorship with Barbara McAfee and her incredible Full Voice work. Today, my seasonal Singing from the Well and Singing in Bloom retreats are places where women can come to fill up the well that feeds them, through the power of song.

I have a deep faith in community singing, as a tool that can build bridges in mere minutes and bring us home to a sense of connection, belonging, and joy. My dear friend and mentor Laurence Cole describes group singing as one of the most “ancient and original ‘technologies of belonging’ that humans have used since the earliest times.” It’s a balm to restore and remember our common humanity, and to find our ground when there seems to be none beneath us. I see it’s profound impact on the lives of my community when we come together to sing.

So please, come as you are. Bring your stories about how you are not a singer. Bring your joy and your pain for the world around you. Bring your love or your fear of singing. It will all be welcomed.