Torch - Fall 2016

Real Confidence: A Video Made by Our Students By now you may have seen Havergal’s Real Confidence video, posted on YouTube in late April. It features a cool message about girls finding the courage to problem solve and asks the key question “What if all it takes to change the way girls respond to challenges is to change the way that we respond to girls?” But the story behind how it was made is even cooler. After filming Upper School student Jade Crenian acting out the video, Havergal’s advertising agency Red Lion created stills and had every student in the school trace them, adding whatever colours and outside designs they wanted. So literally every student had a hand in animating it. Matthew Litzinger, President and Chief Creative Officer of Red Lion, marvels at its creation. “What better way for a school to illustrate how much they believe in the growth in their student body than to hand over the execution to that student body?” The video was promoted on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram and garnered more than 90,000 views. To view it, visit bit.ly/HCRealConfidence2016

Stellato applied to Havergal without telling her parents, who only found out when they heard about an interview. “I was like, ‘Sorry, forgot to tell you!’ Havergal had always been my dream school,” recalls Stellato. Arriving in Grade 9, she says her intuition was confirmed from the start. “I just got such a special feeling here and I still do every day,” she says. Being bullied early on at her previous school was an experience that Stellato says made her lose all of her confidence, which gave her even more of an appreciation for the warmth she found at Havergal. Stellato identifies her role on the Rowing team as coxswain as a major source for her own confidence today. “A coxswain is a small person who sits in the boat and yells at the people much taller than her,” explains Stellato. “For that job, you need a lot of confidence, you need the ability to tell people exactly what to do and when, even though it makes you uncomfortable.”

when she arrived here in Grade 7 is now something she identifies as a source for her own confidence. “Everyone’s open, so you can express whatever you want. You can express your own opinions and no one’s going to say anything,” says Ng. She credits her friends at Havergal with helping to make her laugh and calm her down. She likes the idea of Havergal’s new hashtag campaign, because she agrees that there can be a lot of pressure on girls her age, especially around topics like body image and the pressure that girls face of constantly comparing themselves to others. Also in the Upper School, Megan Stellato is a Grade 12 student, one of the Middle School Prefects and an accomplished athlete who made the Canadian National Junior Women’s Rowing Team to compete at the CanAmMex regatta this summer. Showing an early independent streak,

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Talia Ng wears her Gold 2015 Junior Pan Am medal with pride.

FALL 2016 • TORCH 19