Anne Seatiel Cruz Tinio, She/Her/Hers
Tell us about yourself:
My name is Anne Tinio and I am in my fourth year of Honours Life Sciences, specializing in Sensory Motor Systems and minoring in Psychology at McMaster University. I am from Toronto, but continuing my studies remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic has made me appreciate Hamilton more and made me want to learn more about the city. It is for this reason that I applied to CityLAB. Besides gaining a more hands-on experience that is structured away from your typical lecture-based learning, CityLAB has allowed me to find what I am truly passionate about - public health and health policy. Before applying to CityLAB, I was unsure about what I wanted to do after my undergraduate studies. However, after being enrolled in CityLAB, I truly realized that I find fulfillment and joy connecting working with people in the community, which led me to pursuing public health, in the hopes of working to protecting and improving the health of communities and its peoples. CityLAB has forced me to explore things outside of my comfort zone, allowed me to enhance my public-speaking and community engagement skills, and meet and collaborate with so many amazing people. Above all, CityLAB has shown me how my actions and decisions impact my community, and how we have the ability to make changes when we all work together.
Outside of academia, I love traveling, listening to music, going to the gym and working out, hanging out with friends, and trying new things.
How is your project going so far?
My team focuses on the affordable rental housing portion of the housing continuum. Throughout the first few weeks of the semester, we have focused on having effective dialogue with various stakeholders who we identified will offer different perspectives on the housing crisis in the City of Hamilton. In each conversation, we asked stakeholders various topics that may play a role surrounding housing affordability, such as identifying gaps in research, barriers that residents may face when seeking affordable housing, efficiency of public policies, the flawed definition of "affordability", and identifying whose voices tend to be silent and unheard. Through these conversations, we are hoping to pinpoint overarching and emerging factors in affordable housing, which can help us make recommendations in potential and feasible solutions for the residents of the City of Hamilton who are facing difficulties either gaining access to affordable housing, or transitioning further in the continuum. Because we are hearing from different stakeholders, both in the private and public sectors, one of the biggest difficulties my team is facing is honing in on one focus area out of all the problems the stakeholders have identified. To overcome this barrier, my team is looking at the commonalities that all stakeholders have identified, which signifies that it is a pressing matter that affects all parties involved, as well as identifying what aspects we have the most control over (or what is mostly in-scope), and focusing on that rather than also working on things we have no control over (out-of-scope). Currently, we are still gathering data and identifying what we have the most control over before ideating potential solutions.