Webinars for Newly Admitted Graduate Students 2025 - Family Care

OK, here we go.

Hello everyone, umm, welcome to the intro to the Family Care Office presentation. Today I have the pleasure of introducing Helen who is from the Family Care Office and she will be presenting umm, what the Family Care Office is and the services that they provide. Over to you Alan.

Perfect. Thank you, Patrick. As Patrick said, my name is Helen Reddy Katz. I am the student family care advisor, Student focus within the family care office. Our office, uh, meets with student staff and faculty from across the university. But particularly in my role, I get to meet with a lot of students, many grad students such as yourselves.

So a little bit about the Family Care Office. The Family Care Office provides guidance, resources, and educational programming on topics such as planning for a child, child care, parenting strategy, and elder care, as well as many other family issues you might encounter.

So if you're new to the city and you're bringing a dependent with you and you're looking for child care, if you're wondering about registering for the school system, we're here to help.

Were one of U of T's equity offices. And as I mentioned before, we serve student staff and faculty and we're Tri campus. So we operate across all three campuses, UTM, Saint George and UTSC. We're a small staff. We're a staff of four people and we see about 2000 appointments, inquiries, inquiries a year. Umm, this is both direct inquiries and departmental consultations. So we're busy. So we want to make time for everyone.

But know that it is a small group of people in a, in a very busy office. Umm, we hold 50 plus workshops a year. So these are great places for you and your family to, umm, get important information. But we also hold events. So we have community building events, webinars, et cetera. And those are places that you can meet other student parents and student caregivers such as yourself on.

EU of T campus or in our virtual spaces.

So here's some names you might see as you're, uh, researching the family care office acting managers. Natasha Vanderberg. Uh, Natasha does, umm, some work. She'll occasionally cover for me if I'm on vacation or if you need to meet with someone urgently. She works a lot with our faculty and staff in the office. Then, uh, next is me. I work mainly with students. We also have leukemia, Carbasi and Kimya, uh, handles our education and communications.

Umm, So she schedules a lot of the workshops. She's the coordinator you'll see in our workshops and also handles our social media, et cetera. And finally, we have Mika van Gerwen.

Mika's great 'cause she's the one when you e-mail family don't care when you call our office, his chances are it's Mika that you will be talking to.

So a few reasons as a grad student why you choose to meet with us in family care. So first of all, we have a peer mentorship program for both young parents and young carers. It's gonna be resuming fall of 2025 that you can sign up to be a mentee or a mentor in the program if you're a returning student. Umm, we do have currently this summer if someone wants to talk to a mentor urgently, we have a summer student that's doing a few mentorship hours for us over the.

In summer, but the program will resume completely in the fall, allowing you to be paired with another graduate student with family responsibilities to talk to them about how they've managed the the dual load over the course of this time. Umm, we also provide support and advocacy for students. We review equity concerns, support our academic petitions regarding family situations. Umm, so we, we work a lot with.

When things do come up, especially unexpectedly over the course of your degree, we help you either self advocate or work with your department on on how to best manage the situation.

We provide information on both SGS and QP parental leaves and funding. And I'm going to take a moment to Start Stop here because some people might, uh, be coming with the plan of maybe having a child over the course of the degree or maybe their family or grow over the course of the degree. Know that U of T has great parental leaves available both through the school of graduate studies and also through your, your QP, which is the union that covers your TA chefs.

And so it's a family care office, it's myself or the office that you'd reach out to if you're find yourself expecting or a partner expecting and you want to explore how to best take these leaves.

So next would be just to connect with students and staff on the campus resources and uh, community resources available. So again, whether that's connecting direct directly with me with a mentor, coming into a group setting where you're learning from other staff and students in our office, those are all options. And the last, what we hope to do overall is build community amongst the student.

Student parents living at the university and the student caregivers. Some of you might be fortunate to have received spots in family housing, which uh, creates a great network of of UMM.

Connections for the students living there. But not all student families are living on family housing, so we want to give people an opportunity to meet each other.

Little bit of a where to find us. We're located temporarily, very long term, temporarily over on Huron St. which is on the southwest corner of campus. We're in Suite 603. We do have an open office, but be aware that we all work on a hybrid rotating schedule. So especially if you're looking for an individual and given that we're having appointments and workshops during this time, booking an appointment is is the best scenario.

We're here Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 12:00 and 1:00 to 4:30.

So the best way to make an appointment with me is via my bookings link, which will be available in the next slide as well. And this will give an opportunity. These umm by default are virtual meetings, but if you'd like to come meet in the office, you can definitely make that request as well.

So thank you for meeting with me. And one other thing I want to say before we're gone, I don't know, Patrick, does the chat show up in the recorded features?

Umm, I don't believe so. It's only recording of the video, but uh, we we'll see when when the recording comes out.

OK, well I will say it orally then. Umm, if you visit our website and go to our events session, we're currently populating all the things we have going on over the summer and over the fall. So similar to this session, we have a number of orientation sessions specifically for students with family responsibilities. So next week we have a session on housing and umm, in the month of August, we're gonna have a session on registering your child in the Toronto District School.

So if you are coming, because that's a common question, if you're coming with a child and you're saying how do I register from, from this? For school, don't panic 'cause we do have a session on that and most schools will be out over the course of July and August with administration only returning the last week of August. So it's sort of the last step. Umm, in addition, umm in September we will have some meet and greet socials on each of the three campuses.

We set a date that will be on our website shortly for our September social. I believe it's on September 20th.

In UMM near the Saint George campus, but will also be present at both the UTSC Homecoming and during the UTM orientation week for people to meet us.

Thank you.

OK, on behalf of the School of Graduate Studies, thank you Helen for your time and for sharing your expertise with us. The recording will be available a week after this presentation because of the website and how it works. So I I think that's it. So thank you everyone who is watching and I hope you have a good day. Bye bye.

CS GO.