Every year, Alphonse Daniel takes a group selfie with Hart House's Youth Advisory Council — a small ritual that, four years in, has become a record of who has come through the program and where they've gone.
Daniel earned an Honours BSc in Population Health, Health Humanities and Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough before joining Hart House as Program Associate, Community Access & Outreach. He now co-leads Youth Access programming for high school students while pursuing a Master of Social Work at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.
In today’s society, I don't think there's a type of medicine more important than that.Alphonse Daniel
The Youth Access and Community Access programs Daniel runs, funded by the Hart House Innovation Fund, span leadership workshops for high schoolers and events and Work Readiness Programs for the wider community, including direct youth subsidies. A poetry workshop designed two years ago by work-study student Janelle moved its Youth Advisory Council participants to tears.
The results are showing up back inside Hart House itself. Former co-op student Sean Chen, whom Daniel has mentored for three years, now volunteers more than 60 hours at Kids Help Phone. Teya, once a member of the Youth Advisory Council, is now Co-Chair of the Hart House Finance Committee and a Rotman School of Management student. Others, including Christopher, who came through the Native Youth Resource Centre, and Omar, now work at Hart House themselves.
Daniel's manager, Danielle Dinunzio, has watched the same pattern repeat: young people arrive as participants and, in time, become the ones running the room. For Daniel, that circularity is the point — proof that community, once built, keeps building itself.
Reported from U of T alum Alphonse Daniel finds meaning and community through Hart House's Youth Access program, by Megan Wykes (U of T Alumni News, January 30, 2026).
More from the original reporting: alumni.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-alum-alphonse-daniel-finds-meaning-and-community-through-hart-houses-youth-access-program