Tony Colley

Transcript

everyone calls me tall Tony bet you didn't see that coming right I was known by many in The Nightlife industry as the with the list hosting the biggest parties in the hottest clubs every weekend for 20 years it all started after I moved to Toronto and became a feature dancer on Electric Circus back then I was a club kid that wore PVC separates platform boots Bob wigs and anything else that mattered night nightclubs began to invite me to host parties after the show and that's where I met a small group of friends that began to call me tall Tony three years later one of those

friends seduced me to work with him at the biggest nightclub in Toronto at the time the government and and he gave me business cards with the name tall Tony on them immediately I was rubbing elbows with International DJs models and celebrities all the while working on working in Finance on Bay Street I was a banker by day Club kid by night but nobody knew other than my close personal friends that I had a day job you see I thought being a banker wasn't cool enough to be tall Tony so I never allowed my nightlife Persona to discuss my daytime career and nobody ever asked the

only annoying thing about being this tall is that everybody thinks that I'm a basketball player imagine walking out of your home every single day knowing that no matter where you go or what you do you're going to be stared at and prejudged constantly by strangers simply because you are a walking stereotype in certain circles we call that walking while black and after 20 years it's created a level of self-consciousness that resides at my core now don't get me wrong I love being this tall growing up in Halifax I was short fat and gay and a soon to be female until the age of 15. by

the time I moved to Toronto I was 22 6'5 185 pounds it was 1994. and for those of you who are quick with math no wrinkles I adulted in Toronto living two completely separate lives for 20 years until one day I decided to decided to merge the two and become an entrepreneur I scheduled my first client and my launch event was scheduled for July 9 2016. by this time my work history consisted of 16 years with two National Banks four years with a non-profit organization and two years as an entrepreneur on July 10 2016 the world I knew flatlined I had 278 dollars to my

name no job a failed business venture had to apply for social assistance and became food insecure for the first time in my life at 44 years old I did know who I was or who I would become but the only thing I knew at that time was that I was no longer a tall Tony depression set in and soon my mind began to consider decisions I could never come back from I felt totally alone and cried almost every day yet was too embarrassed to tell my friends what was really going on so the only person I told was my mother thankfully I got my head

out of the ditch and by September I secured a part-time job working in Hospitality for various catering companies I wasn't making a lot of money but I was grateful to be making more than I had the month before fast forward six months I'm on Facebook and I stumbled upon an article that said in 2015 Canada had a 31 Billion Dollar Food waste issue now food waste wasn't a thing for me because I had none to waste but I read the article from start to finish and at the end I said out loud they should feed this food to the homeless in September 2017 I was

still on social assistance I was still depressed and I was still food insecure in that same month I was scheduled to manage an event for our largest catering partner and at the end of a 12-hour shift the CEO offered me a job within weeks I was managing my first event and at the end of the event we had over 100 box lunches left over seeing the cause of our food waste issue firsthand I offered to rescue what I could and did so every event thereafter on my bike it wasn't until July 2018 when for the first time I couldn't Rescue all the food on my

way through the shelter I became extremely angry with myself because I put myself in a position that I could not step back from without the proper resources for an employer who seemingly had no other option than to throw this food in the garbage in that moment of frustration an Uber Eats driver whips past me on his bike with one of those bags on his back and I said out loud I need one of those bags I got home I researched the bag it was forty dollars and I went wait a minute I wonder if I could hire an Uber driver to do rescues for me

and how would I pay him to do it that thought triggered me to consider all of the other retailers out there that could benefit from this service grocery stores food courts hotels event venues the possibilities blew my mind right away I begin to research food waste and food insecurity and realized that Canada now has a 49 billion dollar food-based issue yet 4 million Canadians are suffering from food insecurity and at the time I was one of them rotting food creates methane gas which is 25 times more damaging to the environment than CO2 emissions retailer food waste makes up 10 of our national food waste issue

which is five billion dollars worth of wasted edible food going in the garbage every single year for Rancho is the largest metropolitan City in this country and we have more than twenty thousand food retailers in the GTA alone so we are a large part of that problem realizing all of this I decided that I would develop Canada's first barrier-free food waste diversion program and in May of 2019 I launched B1 to give be one to give is a for-profit social Enterprise operating as a delivery app for food retailers with surplus food at the end of the day consider us the Uber Eats a food rescue

because we redistribute the shelters within the hour of receipt since September 2017 I rescued 10 778 pounds of food feeding more than 8 000 people in the city of Toronto the last 3 000 being through my business children globally are boycotting school because they're scared they won't have a future so we as adults need to do our part to ensure that their future lives matter so I welcome you all to join me on this journey because this is just the beginning in the past three years I've learned that even in our darkest moments we can find our purpose in life as long as you humble

yourself through the process be grateful for what you have and truly believe in yourself I promise you will be rewarded in ways you can't imagine thank you

Transcript generated from the recording and lightly cleaned. Some names and wording may differ from the spoken speech.