Award Recipients

Under the leadership of Rhonda Harrison, the Convocation team delivered an exceptional student experience for Humber Polytechnic and the University of Guelph-Humber. This is an annual event that is developed with many pre and post planning tasks with a dedicated committee across the institution.

This multi-day event that was held in mid-June this year saw the highest graduate attendance rate in Humber's history with over 6800 students and guests RSVPing to attend the graduation ceremonies.

The event involves thorough planning and organization of multiple resources from both within Humber and external vendors to provide a seamless, high quality experience for Humber's graduates and their guests.

The organizers of this year's event incorporated the University of Guelph-Humber ceremonies, introduced new external vendors and navigated challenging political and world events that impacted convocation ceremonies throughout North America. This was accomplished through tireless efforts, superior planning and a collaborative approach to supporting the success of each convocation ceremony and maintain the reputation of Humber.

The four main areas of the committee this year consisted of:

• Logistics: This team oversees all the graduates and their guests, the executive team, department senior deans, faculty and staff. In addition, the recruitment of staff volunteers to support the ceremonies is completed to ensure the smooth transition of the day. Secondly, schedules of the dates of all ceremonies are arranged accordingly to ensure no overlaps occur and that the best experience is given to all successful graduates of Humber and the University of Guelph-Humber. Thirdly, collaborating with multiple third party/external vendors to ensure the tasks are completed and costs are budgeted accordingly can be cumbersome. but has to be done to provide a seamless event.
• Public Safety: Ensuring that all patrons and guests are safe, this year due to challenging world events, a public safety plan had to be put in place to ensure no one felt 'unsafe'. Key members from Humber's Public Safety team and the leads of the convocation team, developed a plan to support all the ceremonies. In addition, multiple plans had to be considered at the Toronto Congress which is a third party venue.
• Communications: Communications is key to ensure all parties that are either working or attending convocation understand the expectations and the process of convocation. Members of the Marketing and Communication department assisted in getting communications developed and dispatching them accordingly to targeted audiences as they seem fit. Plan B communications have to also be considered in case there are unexpected issues that may occur and need to be deployed.
• AV/ITS Management: In order to support members and guests to attend convocation virtually, the AV/ITS team supported the transmission of the ceremonies across Humber's platform. Our students have family and friends that are unable to attend the in-person convocation and we want to ensure they are able to join in the celebrations of their loved ones on this milestone.

The Convocation Team always strives to plan and execute a seamless an annual event for Humber faculty, students and its guests. The effort in the execution of the event is recognized as a memorable event for all those involved and those experiencing the milestone of convocation. This has been an exceptional year, having multiple events that have taken place. The team has had to pivot at the same time ensure that the experience is not taken away for our graduates and guests.

The Longo Centre for Entrepreneurship (CfE) team has demonstrated high levels of commitment and dedication to serving colleagues and staff, students, and clients through:

1. Supporting high school students and recent grads becoming career ready.
2. Bringing entrepreneurial learning to students by supporting faculty and staff.
3. Using technology to enhance accessibility to entrepreneurial learning.

With the many initiatives that the Longo CfE offers to students to help them start businesses and learn entrepreneurial skills, the Longo CfE team has gone above and beyond, to increase the opportunities for students to access entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills training to bolster their career-readiness as they move forward in their post-secondary education and beyond. The team’s efforts allowed more than 800 students and alumni to experience entrepreneurship and receive entrepreneurship education.

Among the students and alumni supported by the Longo CfE were high school students, Humber Polytechnic and Guelph-Humber students, and recent graduates of Humber. Through the Longo Family Be Your Own Boss – High School Edition Program, local high school students attended three entrepreneurship workshops to develop their business ideas and learn skills for their future careers. The impact on the high school students were evident in the videos they created to pitch their business ideas to the Longo Family, and in their explanations of how the program affected them.

The success of the Longo CfE’s programs can be at least partially attributed to the team’s efforts to provide a wide range of delivery options such as online, hybrid, and in-person. The Longo CfE team over the past academic year piloted a new mode of delivery for the Longo Family Be Your Own Boss program, offering a hybrid in-person model whereby students at North and Lakeshore campus attended the workshops in-person at their respective campuses while the two in-person locations were connected virtually. This allowed students of both campuses to attend in-person at their desired campus while benefitting from the connection to peers at the other campus which opened the door to sharing ideas, networking, and collaborating. Furthermore, this simultaneously hybrid and in-person mode of delivery also increased access to students from the International Graduate School (IGS) campus who were now free to attend in-person at North or Lakeshore campus as most convenient for them.

The collaborations with faculty and staff led to meaningful outcomes for students, event participants, and industry partners. With a growing number of students involved with the Longo CfE, the extra mile represents only the beginning of a long journey with innovative paths less taken that will pave the way for the future of servicing staff, students, and clients.

On January 22, 2024, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced an intake cap on international study permit applications, along with the requirement that every new study permit application submitted to IRCC must be accompanied by a provincial attestation letter (PAL) from a province or territory. The Ontario College Application Service (OCAS) was chosen by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MCU) to create the Provincial Attestation Letter (PAL) Service. System requirements were defined on how the information would be transmitted from the institution to OCAS; Humber was tasked with developing their own in-house process to define criteria on who would be eligible to receive a PAL and send the unique digital PAL to the applicant securely.

Humber Polytechnic, in particular the Registrar's Office and Information Technology Services, under the leadership of Barb Riach and Ruth Butlin played a crucial role in building out the automation and implementing the process around PAL in less than two months. The teams worked tirelessly putting in many extra hours to navigate around stringent timelines, evolving requirements and other conflicting organizational priorities to seamlessly develop, test and implement the solution ahead of the provincial deadline of March 31.

Since March 28, 2024 to present, Humber has issued over 2,600 PALs to prospective students, simultaneously over three intakes: Summer 2024, Fall 2024 and Winter 2025. Humber demonstrated leadership in the sector by being the first institutes in Ontario to issue over 1,000 PALs within the first few days of its launch. Through the collaboration of various cross-functional teams, Humber is well-positioned to meet the enrolment objectives and support the financial well-being of the institution.

The Registrar's Office and ITS worked tirelessly to navigate around stringent timelines, evolving requirements and other conflicting organizational priorities to seamlessly develop, test and implement the Provincial Attestation Letter solution ahead of the federal deadline of March 31, putting Humber in the lead by issuing the most PALs across the province in the first few days.