Heroes In Black X Fashion Santa: Holiday Heroes And My First Billboard.
When Matte Black, founder of Toronto-based charity ‘Heroes In Black’, reached out to me to get involved with his charity and shoot some photos I couldn’t say no, and I had no idea what I was about to get myself into…
To say that 2017 was a blessing is an understatement, by far it was one of the best years both personally and entrepreneurially that I can ever remember having, and if there’s one thing I learned from my parents when I was growing up it’s about giving back.
I was contacted by Matte a while ago to get involved with his Heroes In Black charity, a Toronto-based organization founded by him after seeing a need to fix the current system from his first hand experiences being a homeless youth on the streets of Toronto on and off for 10 years. Matte’s story is one of struggle, pain and loss which turned to a beautiful tale of opportunity, growth, making change and hope. It was after he was given a chance by somebody that helped get him off the streets for good, turn his life around, and find his passion in helping others that are facing the struggles he faced that he found his purpose in life, giving to those that he was once counted among. Honestly, if you hear Matte tell you his story I assure you you’d swear somebody just started chopping onions.

He called me up one day and asked if I was free to come to an important meeting he was having and that he would like me to be there, I checked the schedule, set the appointment, planned to meet up at OutFront Media Canada‘s head office. Little did I know this meeting would be one with the VP, and that we’d be discussing their partnership with Heroes In Black and the upcoming national billboard campaign that they would be donating for the upcoming Christmas holiday initiatives…and I was not only going to be the photographer for the campaign, but I was about to be given a lead role as Senior Photographer at Heroes In Black. Speechless.
After meeting with the VP and Creative Director of OutFront Media we got the ball rolling. Matte had decided to reach out to Paul Mason who’s most famously known as Fashion Santa (or Sexy Santa as my mom likes to call him. lol) to collaborate and do this year’s Christmas Day Holiday Heroes event together in addition to a “Skate To End Homelessness” at Nathan Phillips Square where Paul would skate for 12 hours and collect donations from people who wanted selfies with him.
I’ll be honest, as this point I was pinching myself pretty hard. I was about to work on a billboard campaign with a Toronto fashion icon for an absolutely amazing cause. Neither of those 3 things had been on my bucket list for 2017 but they were about to be, and they were about to get crossed off.
After the mood boards were laid out and we knew what aqnd where we were working with we set up the shoot for a weekday evening down by city hall on what seemed like the coldest day of the winter so far. After a few hours of braving the cold we got enough shots that we knew we could use, flipped them to the designer, and the next thing I knew I was looking at digital mock-ups of something using a photo of mine that would soon be seen by hundreds of thousands of people across Canada for the next few weeks.


Once we shot and sent out the visuals I kind of forgot about them until my friend Josh sent me a message on Facebook with a photo of the billboard at Exhibition GO Station that he noticed on his way home one night.
I’ve been published in magazines, newspapers, on various media websites around the world, but let me tell you that there’s nothing quite like driving down the Gardiner Expressway and looking over to see your photo that size and seen by that many people for such a great cause. It truly made me thankful not only for Matte and him bringing me on to Heroes In Black, but also for everything in my career that got me to the point where he would think to bestow such an honor and responsibility on me. It reminded me that through all my adversity I faced in my life, and those times I pushed through when I thought it was pointless, that it was all for a reason and that there were awesome things like this to come, and to remember moments like this the next time I was feeling down.
On Christmas morning my father and I gathered with about 60 volunteers in the -30C temperatures and led by Matte Black and Fashion Santa ventured out to give gifts we had brought to the homeless on the streets of Toronto. I handed out packs of gloves, hats, socks, 2 chocolate bars and a $10 Tim Hortons Gift card (which was donated to me by the Tim Hortons at Hockey Hall of Fame. Thanks Angela!) and every single person we came across was so thankful to receive something we all take for granted.
What an fantastic and special way to spend Christmas morning.

If you told me 3.5 years ago when I was let go from my day job that it would be the push I needed to go out and succeed on the level I have in my dream job I would have laughed in disbelief, now, I laugh because I know it’s possible and I’m humored by how afraid I was at failing.
So if there’s one thing I want to leave you with it’s this; Most people give up before they even give themselves a chance to succeed, don’t be that person, be the person that keeps pushing and pushing no matter how many obstacles get set in your way…because all of your dreams are out there, and they’re for the most part attainable, you just need to not let anything stop you. Leave your fear of failure in 2017, may your 2018 be everything you wanted and then some.
If you’d like to come out and volunteer with Heroes In Black feel free to reach out to them via their website, or Facebook.
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[…] in Toronto, this wasn’t my first time seeing my work on a billboard. Previously, I was part of a national advertising campaign with Paul Mason—better known as Fashion Santa—in collaboration with the charity organization Heroes In Black. […]