Speaker Biography
With a long, diverse, and unconventional education/career path, samantha has held many titles. From customer service agent in a sex toy shop, to Planned Parenthood abortion counselor, to dive bartender, to nationally recognized relationship expert – using each opportunity to hone her intelligences.
Samantha was drawn to the field of sexual health, through her own negative experiences of insufficient, and at times harmful, access to education and healthcare. Vowing to be the person she never had on the other end of young women and people’s engagement with sexual health care, she obtained a volunteership as a Peer Educator at Planned Parenthood Toronto.
Discovering a passion and talent for connecting with individuals in client-centered, intersectional care, as well as mentoring others to so, she began exploring program development for community health promotion locally and internationally.
Patterns identified through this work, led her to founding Inner Development Project, a Toronto-based outreach program, facilitating workshops with young women/femme spectrum non-binary youth. Workshops focus on the development and strengthening of inter and intrapersonal skills – addressing the negative mental, physical and sexual health outcomes prevalent in this age group.
Often told she was “not a good fit” in formal institutions, Samantha was pulled away from the clinic/health care sector and into entrepreneurship in a variety of community focused practices aiming to create educational spaces that address injustices, the erasure of communities marginalized by racism, homophobia/transphobia, ableism and classism. Critical to this work is changing the ways these communities access arts, education and resources, through an emotional intelligence and anti-oppression framework.
Through many iterations, failures, and self-limiting beliefs, Samantha began experimenting with a highly aestheticized, dramatized, comedic version of herself to present her work. Deploying and learning new creative and technical skill sets, this ‘femme armour’ made way for samantha bitty, and she has since been presenting her out-of-the-box (and out-of-pocket), pleasure centered and comprehensive sex education to youth, post secondary and adult audiences across Canada and via virtual means, internationally.
Aside from her work as a public speaker/media personality, samantha works as an equity consultant for a range of services industry clients, project manages public artworks, and provides individual and partnered sex/relationship emotional intelligence coaching.
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