Honouring and acknowledging the success and achievements of former George Brown students
Cheryl Cecchetto, Governor’s ball producer, dishes to April Baker on this year’s Governor’s Ball.
Photo: WEBN-TV/CC BY-ND 2.0
The Premier’s Awards honour the accomplishments of Ontario college graduates both in the province and throughout the world, acknowledging students from business, community services, creative arts and design, health sciences, technology as well as recent graduates, according to the 2015 Premier’s Awards website.
This year 116 graduates have been nominated for the awards, six of whom are George Brown College (GBC) alumni, having graduated between 1980 and 2013.
Cheryl Cecchetto, a theatre arts program graduate in 1980, is now running her own event company Sequoia Productions in Los Angeles.
“I feel quite honoured to be nominated by a school with such an incredible reputation,” said Cecchetto. “But what is really interesting is that I was there when the theatre program started with Joseph Shaw, a veteran actor and director.”
Under his direction, she feels that the school really built her skills adding that because of the Premier’s Awards “the world can see that the school really nurtures your skills.” She says it’s interesting being nominated more than 30 years later by a school that used to be intimate and small, making her proud of what the college has become.
As for the impact of the nomination on her career, she says that she has always been and will continue to be engaged with many schools in regards to supporting the arts.
Susan Gapka ran for Councillor of Ward 27 Toronto Centre-Rosedale in 2010.
File Photo: Tania Liu/CC BY-ND 2.0
Another GBC nominee, Susan Gapka, who graduated with honours from the community worker program in 2000, was nominated for the award by Robin Buyers, a community worker professor and co-founder of the school of social and community services destination Cuba program.
Gapka came out publicly as a transgender person in college. “I owe this to Margaret Cameron, my former classmate and former manager of equity for the Student Association. She saw me at the Pride Parade and the next day on our way to school, asked whether I thought about going public. That was the seed and she planted it.”
She adds that college along with the extracurricular activities pushed her confidence. Gapka also mentioned a documentary by Lisa Rideout saying, “I have a story to tell. 10 years of struggle living on the streets along with all the work I’ve done, I want to share it with the world and apparently the world wants to hear it based on the Kickstarter results.”
The Kickstarter campaign that was set up to make the documentary, recently exceeded their goal with $24,184.
“As a transgender person who came from the streets to a Premier’s Awards nomination, I can’t express what an honour it is to me and how confident it makes me feel,” says Gapka.
The 2015 Premier’s Awards gala will be hosted at the Sheraton Centre Hotel Toronto on November 16.
