B.A.S.E. Daycare Program and Spiritual Community Animation Service Win Play It Fair! Award

I am proud to share that our B.A.S.E. Daycare Program and Spiritual Community Animation Service received the Equitas— International Centre for Human Rights Education—National Play it Fair! award at Vincent Massey Collegiate (VMC).

Annually, Equitas acknowledges a Canadian organization, school or municipality with an award that promotes the advancement of human rights education. Equitas Associate Director of Programs Julie Kon Kam King explained that the EMSB’s initiative “Supporting Children as Leaders Through Play it Fair!” was selected out of 180 schools across Canada because of its innovative and unique model which includes integrating high school, elementary, and daycare students in play, showing great potential for fostering leadership.

I would like to commend Jennifer De Freitas, Project Development Officer with B.A.S.E, and Rocco Speranza, Spiritual and Community Animator, who crafted a meaningful program for our students, given them this marvelous opportunity to interact with and lead students of different age groups. I extend my congratulations to the 55 VMC students who have participated in the program over the past three years, bringing it to over 600 B.A.S.E. Daycare children in 10 daycares.

Through Play It Fair!, our students have worked together on exciting projects that raise awareness on how to make our schools more inclusive and welcoming places to be. They have explored important issues such as respect for diversity and inclusive environments, children’s rights, respecting the environment, and anti-bullying. 

The values of the Play it Fair! initiative are congruent with EMSB values that are shared across the board, including nurturing and expanding partnerships in order to allow students to reach their full potential, and the promotion of values such as cooperation, unity, inclusion, leadership, respect for diversity, acceptance, kindness and peaceful conflict resolution amongst our students.

We are proud of every student for their participation and determination, and our staff members that guide them. Congratulations on this well-deserved honour!

Play It Fair! leads to projects that raise awareness on how to make schools more inclusive and welcoming places to be. Examples of projects that the VMC students helped the B.A.S.E. children create include: movie trailers on respect for diversity and inclusive environments, a photo slideshow on children’s rights, poster campaigns to celebrate children’s differences, a story book on respecting the environment and anti-bullying games. 

“The B.A.S.E. program puts a lot of emphasis on nurturing and expanding partnerships in order to benefit the children to their greatest potential”, said De Freitas. “A project like the Supporting Children as Leaders through Play it Fair! Program gave everyone involved the opportunity to develop a tailor-made project for B.A.S.E. that merged its goal of providing children with enriching and educational experiences with the Play it Fair! values and with the Spiritual Care and Community Involvement Service Virtues Curriculum, which meets Vincent Massey Collegiate's community service requirements. Students of various ages don’t often get the opportunity to interact with each other. This program provides an excellent opportunity to foster leadership skills.”

“The Spiritual and Community Animation Service allows the promotion of values such as cooperation, unity, inclusion, leadership, respect for diversity, acceptance, kindness and peaceful conflict resolution amongst our students,” said Speranza. “The Play it Fair program further encourages the development of these aforementioned values. It’s a great honour to be recognized for our work in the schools.”