The LiveWorkPlay News – Live at Make a Buzz Ottawa, May 10, 2024
On the occasion of the LiveWorkPlay 29th Anniversary and the annual Make A Buzz Ottawa Celebration of Community, Keenan Wellar delivers The LiveWorkPlay News top ten countdown for 2023-2024 at the Preston Event Centre. Below is the live captioned video from the event and a full unofficial transcript. You can get a summary of the entire night and we also have two huge Facebook photo albums AWARDS and PEOPLE.
Keenan Wellar:
Welcome to another live edition of The LiveWorkPlay News, it started as an online tradition during the pandemic, and by popular demand, we just kept it going by moving it to our live events! If you were at the April 2nd Open House for our new office at Bayview Yards, you have already seen this algorithm, which we revealed for the first time. I wanted to share it here again tonight to be clear that our top news countdowns are totally objective and based on a collection of scientific social media analytics that determine the top stories.
Before we get to our top ten of 2023-2024, just a quick note that we have three late breaking news stories from April: there was the Open House, the Weirdos in the Workplace podcast featuring our own Jen Broad and Laura Lobay, and the return of the Private Sector Employment Task Force, hosted by the incredible Joe Thottungul at Coconut Lagoon. And they’ve already recruited a new task force member, Jessica Yee, Director of Operations at Levy TD Place. If all three of those stories had just a few more days in the charts, they might have cracked the top ten. But that’s not how the algorithm works, so let’s get straight into the actual top ten.
At #10, a wonderful event from National Disability Employment Awareness Month, this presentation at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat featuring one of our former jobseekers Philip Delangy, who works as a Surveillance Coordination Unit Support Officer a Health Canada, delivered a moving speech about the importance of having a chance to show the world what he can do, and having co-workers and supervisors who have supported him to keep learning and growing on the job. Way to go Phillip!
Coming in at #9, Janet Balcome moved into her condominium apartment back in 2012 and she is respected and admired by her neighbors, to the point that she was featured with a huge profile in the condo newsletter. The article explored Janet’s many hobbies and also noted her more than 10 years as a valued employee at Bushtukah. Go Janet!
At #8, a nod our National Volunteer Week campaign organized by Alex Darling, with a little more time that story might have made our top 10, but a different story did get there, that was recognition from Best In Ottawa, where we were independently evaluated and named to the top 8 volunteer groups in the city, with an amazing ranking of #6 in a city that has hundreds of amazing charities where people can choose to share their time.
At #7 the quarterly meetings of our Federal Employment Strategy Group are always big newsmakers, and the March 6 edition drew in the most views and made it into our top ten, but the December edition was not far behind, so congratulations to our Volunteer FESG Chair Mary Gusella and to the entire employment team for continuing to generate so much interest in our work with the federal public service and our national network partners.
At #6, we usually celebrate work anniversary when they hit 5, 10, and 15-year milestones, but once you get past 15, they all deserve some recognition, and our fans agreed, with this story about the 17th work anniversary for Jalynn Plaus at Value Village shooting to #6 in our annual countdown. Congratulations Jalynn and Value Village!
Coming in at #5, you should know that The LiveWorkPlay News does it all, local, provincial, national, and international news, and we were one of the first news outlets in Canada to share this story of Spain electing Mar Galceran, a person with Down syndrome who is know serving in their parliament as a regional representative. Hopefully she will inspire Canadians to one day have similar representation in our own Parliament!
At #4, everyone loves an inspiring human-interest story, and what is more touching than a sister realizing a dream of reuniting with her brother for a visit in a faraway land? With a bit of help from her parents to get to and from the Montreal airport, Jennifer Harris flew solo for the first time, all the way to Costa Rica for an amazing visit with her brother Tim, who works as an international teacher.
Coming in at #3, this story from November was #1 on our December countdown, and still generating views today, it’s Graham Armstrong’s United Way Minute video with United Way East Ontario, which was also a blog post and also appeared on CTV Ottawa television! Way to Graham!
Here we are at #2. It was an incredibly close race for #1, thank goodness we had the TLN algorithm to make the decision. The runner-up for news story of the year was none other than the Festive Family Gathering photo album, with photos and stories from right here at the Preston Event Centre on December 8th. Let’s have a shout out to our lead photographer Chris Jones!
Coming in at #1, this has story has been heading for the top 3 since it first debuted on The LiveWorkPlay News in December, it’s probably not a big secret, your #1 story of the year, Cooper Gage fires up the Ottawa 67s in the pregame ritual. Who wants to see the video?
That’s it for this edition of The LiveWorkPlay News, you’ve been a great audience, please enjoy your salad course and don’t forget the online auction and the 50-50. We’ll be back after your appetizer!