More than a dozen communications awards were handed out to OPSEU/SEFPO locals during an awards celebration at the inSolidarity Committee’s Editors’ Weekend 2026 on Oct 17 in Toronto.
“One of the things I love about labour communications is the sheer range of creativity we see across our membership,” said inSol Committee member Lorinda Seward. “We have people creating videos, designing graphics, writing powerful stories, capturing moments through photography, and finding new ways to connect with members and communities. Some of that work is polished and professional; some is wonderfully grassroots. And that’s worth celebrating.
“Congratulations to all of our nominees and award recipients – and thank you for helping tell the stories of our union!”
Local 109 – Fanshawe College Support
Timely, helpful and just personal enough – The Fanshawe College support workers get a bit of everything in their monthly email newsletter.
There’s a lot to love in this issue from May. In simple to understand language, it flags important changes in their collective agreement.
And it also gives space to members to tell their own stories, which is welcoming and engaging, but also required a lot of time and effort from the editors – great work Local 109!
College Support Part-Time Division
Instagram feed – @collegesupportpt
Scroll through the Insta feed for the College Support Part-Time Division, and you get the feeling you’re in very good hands and very good company.
It’s an excellent mix of clips and photos that inspire action and solidarity – these folks aren’t messing around. And the stream’s graphics and slideshows break down complex ideas into very nicely designed and easily understood tidbits.
Congrats to the part-time support comms team — your hard work is paying off!
Local 241 – Mohawk College Support
Local 241 Newsletter and website
With two units in or on the cusp of bargaining, the leaders of Local 241 at Mohawk College saw a big comms opportunity in May Day, and they seized it with gusto.
To build engagement and solidarity, they created a beautiful magazine version of “The Grapevine,” their longtime newsletter and website.
In a world where we get most of our info through screens, they invited members to sit down, slow down, and learn a bit more about their coworkers and their locals. The writing inspires and the pictures sing.
I’m not in Local 241, but this magazine makes me wish I was! Congrats to everybody involved!
Local 243 – Niagara College Support
Local 243 Website – opseu243.org
When it gets right down to it, a good website is a lot like a good store-front or office building.
People know how to find it. They can get in and out of it. And it’s comfortable and easy to navigate when you’re inside.
Not to downplay some of the excellent content you’ll find inside the websites of Local 243 and Local 416, but we want to shout-out the usability and the accessibility of these two sites.
Looking for your collective agreement? It’s right there. Need to talk to a steward? Easy to find. Curious about upcoming events? They’re right there.
These sites aren’t super-flashy. They’re not super-complicated. But they work, and that’s the main thing.
Great work to Local 243!
Local 249 – Community Living Oakville
Instagram videos – @local249clo
Note: In the wake of the strike settlement in Oct 2026, these amazing videos are no longer live online
When you laugh, the world laughs along with you. The world also starts to listen.
That’s the magic that the Local 249 created during their Worth Fighting For strike this summer.
The 249 comms team has serious video chops – great images and solid sound. Add a healthy dose of humour and imagination and these are videos we can all learn from.
Like the day they showed up at their MPP’s office and noticed that the grass outside was long and unkempt. On the fly, they came up with a fun slogan — Cut your grass, not our public services.
Good joke. Great videos. Fantastic work 249!
Local 262 and 245 – Lynwood Charlton Centre and Sheridan College
Really good video is easy to watch. Really good video is very difficult to create.
To help bear that load the striking Worth Fighting For workers at Lynwood Charlton Centre reached out to some of the experienced OPSEU/SEFPO members at Sheridan College to give them a hand.
It was a match made in heaven
Creating good video is a juggling act. You have to write a good script, which takes a lot of work. You have to shoot a series of good images, which takes a lot of work. And you have to record good, clear audio, which is a lot more important than you might think!
Congrats to the comms crew at Locals 262 and 245 – proof positive that the more we work together, the stronger we all get. Thank you!
Retirees Division
Photography and Facebook Post – Region 2 Retirees
Throw back Thursdays is one of the best-ever internet inventions.
Understanding where we’re coming from will always help us figure out where best to go next.
Maybe nobody understands that better than the folks in OPSEU/SEFPO’s Retirees Division. And it’s just what we get in this submission from The Region 2 Retirees’ Facebook – a great pic from a 2017 OFL march with OPSEU/SEFPO flags flying high.
Great instincts, Region 2. And a great reminder for all of us – old pictures can have new lives. They’re great content. And from a practical point of view, they don’t take much work.
Dig into your archives everybody – there’s gold in there!
Local 304 – York Region Children’s Aid Society
It’s a lot easier to get good media coverage when your members know what’s going on and are moving as one.
That’s a lesson we cal all learn from Local 304. Fighting the bad board and the bosses at York CAS, the comms team kept members up-to-date with frequent emails that were short, informative and inspired action.
And action’s just what they got. Frequent and sympathetic coverage from local media put their issues front and centre and made a real difference for workers and the whole community. Excellent work Local 304!
Local 351 – Fleming College Support
Local 351 Instagram and Facebook – @opseulocal351
Local 351’s social media channels are more than a place to post updates, they’re a tool for connecting with members, sharing their stories, building solidarity, and keeping our union voice visible in the community.
Our five-week strike last fall was a particularly strong example of what our social media can do. We created timely, engaging, and authentic content that documented the experience of our members, shared important information, celebrated solidarity, and helped tell the story of our strike on our terms. Much of that content was widely shared beyond our membership, reaching other locals, allies, and the broader community.
But the work didn’t stop when the strike ended. We continue to use our channels to engage members, highlight local and provincial campaigns, celebrate union wins, promote education and events, amplify member voices, and connect our members’ everyday experiences to the larger labour movement.
Local 373 – Peterborough Regional Health Centre
Emails and bulletin board poster
A monthly newsletter is great for any local. But the biggest challenge is often this: when you’re just a bunch of volunteers, how do you keep it up month after month, year after year?
The folks in Local 373 have figured out some of the little hacks that can be a big help. Keep it simple. Keep it clear. Repeat.
A stand-out part of their submission – a nice welcome email for new members. Write it once, and that part of the work is done for years. A lesson for all of us – thanks Local 373!
Sector 1 Divisional Executive
Newsletter
For first responders, the stakes on the job are often very high and very urgent.
To keep themselves, and all of us, as safe as possible, it is imperative that first responders go to work knowing exactly how and why their union is working for them.
That was the inspiration for the Sector 1 quarterly newsletter, and the entire divisional executive has delivered.
Four times a year, members get an impressive amount of information in their inbox. From campaigns and concerns that could become campaigns. Links to important info and resources. And in one especially heartbreaking edition we saw, the sad news about the on-the-job deaths of colleagues.
Congrats to the entire Divex for taking on this difficult but important work..
Local 383 – Orillia Soldiers Memorial Hospital
Printed newsletter
Official channels are important, but we all know that the real discussions take place in informal chats in the break room. The folks in Local 383 have leaned in to this basic truth and publish an excellent newsletter called “Breakroom Chat”
Packed to the gills with snapshots and news snippets, the local makes great use of a single letter-sized piece of paper to keep members up to date on their local and the union.
We’re especially pleased to see a lovely little feature that lists and thanks the names of retiring members, while also welcoming by name the new members who’ve just joined the local.
Excellent work to the comms team in Local 383!
Local 416 – Algonquin College Support
When it gets right down to it, a good website is a lot like a good store-front or office building.
People know how to find it. They can get in and out of it. And it’s comfortable and easy to navigate when you’re inside.
Not to downplay some of the excellent content you’ll find inside the websites of Local 243 and Local 416, but we want to shout-out the usability and the accessibility of these two sites.
Looking for your collective agreement? It’s right there. Need to talk to a steward? Easy to find. Curious about upcoming events? They’re right there.
These sites aren’t super-flashy. They’re not super-complicated. But they work, and that’s the main thing.
Great work to Local 416!
Local 417 – St. Lawrence College Faculty
Podcast
The written word speaks to the mind. The spoken word speaks to the heart.
And that’s why we’re so impressed by the podcast created by the members of Local 417.
Cleverly called “CAAT Tales,” this member-created podcast stands up against an anything we hear on iTunes or Spotifty.
The sounds quality is excellent, which is vital in podcasts. And in the submitted episode, the content is just as strong. It’s about the terrible uncertainty at St. Lawrence and Fleming Colleges, where merger and closure talks are running rampant.
We love that the show connects members in Local 417 with voices from other locals, building solidarity and common cause. Excellent work 417!
is a podcast created by OPSEU/SEFPO Local 417 faculty to keep our community informed, connected, and supported — especially during times when official communication from the college falls short. It began as a simple idea: build solidarity, help members understand one another’s work, and create a space where faculty voices could be heard without filters, spin, or corporate messaging.
From the start, CAAT Tales focused on who our members are — their stories, their expertise, their challenges, and the everyday realities of teaching and supporting students. It was meant to close a communication gap and strengthen the fabric of our local.
Then everything changed.
When program closures, partial‑load losses, full-time layoffs, and an unprecedented college merger were announced, the podcast’s role became essential. Members needed clarity. They needed honesty. They needed information that wasn’t being provided anywhere else. CAAT Tales stayed true to its original mission, but it also became something bigger:
a reliable, unfiltered channel for truth‑telling during a historic moment in Ontario’s college system.
Today, CAAT Tales serves three core purposes:
- Connection: keeping members linked to one another, even across campuses and summer breaks.
- Transparency: sharing what we know, what we don’t, and what we’re fighting for.
- Solidarity: helping faculty, support staff, students, and community allies understand what’s happening — and why it matters.
It’s a place where workers speak plainly, where complex issues are broken down with care, and where the human impact of institutional decisions is treated as central, not incidental. Whether you’re listening from a beach, a backyard, or between summer adventures, CAAT Tales is here to keep you informed, grounded, and connected to your union community.
Local 511 – Surrey Place
When workers go on strike, a lot of people have a lot of questions.
During its Worth Fighting For strike over the summer, the Local 511 Instagram reels expertly asked those questions and then answered them in plain, simple language even a kid could understand.
In an especially notable series that we saw, Local 511 even let real kids ask their own real questions. Genius and adorable.
Great work to Local 511 for all the effort they clearly pour into the feed. We look forward, and forward to meeting some of these kids in union meetings down the road!
Corrections Division
Instagram feed – @opseucorrectionsdivision
Discipline and rigour are vital qualities in Corrections Work, and those qualities are on full display in the solid and reliable Instagram feed maintained by the members of the Corrections Division.
Whether they’re posts about bargaining, or mental health, or charity events in the community, there’s never any doubt that you’re looking at a post from Corrections. Their sense of branding and voice are impeccable making it crystal clear to Corrections members everywhere that this content is for them.
Great work Corrections!
Liquor Board Employees Division
Quarterly newsletter – The Echo
Individual articles or posts can grab your attention and blow your socks off, but an often unsung virtue of any communications strategy is consistency.
It’s a lesson the LBED Divisional Executive has clearly learned.
Completely written and edited by members for members, the LBED Echo is as reliable as the seasons and the whole division is stronger for it.
With each issue, members get a no-nonsense round-up of the work being done by each of the division’s committees. Whether it’s the latest on health and safety or the constant challenge of liquor privatization, members always have a source of real and up-to-date info.
Great work LBED Division!
