Scarborough Youth Leader to Compete in North America’s Largest Inspirational Speaking Competition

Adrian Leckie was 16 years old, walking home from his high school’s homecoming game, when two police officers stopped him about a convenience store robbery and told him to empty his backpack. He laid his textbooks, water bottle, and lunchbox out on the street to prove his innocence. In his words from the stage, he felt “the weight of my blackness.” He buried the experience, because that was what being strong looked like. He has spent his career answering that moment, building spaces where Black youth are seen for who they are rather than what people assume about them. On July 21, 2026, he will compete at Speaker Slam®, North America’s largest inspirational speaking competition, its Identity themed event at Lula Lounge in Toronto.

Adrian first took the Speaker Slam stage with that story and placed second at the competition’s Belonging event. The speech traced what came after the police stop: years of burying every experience of discrimination, until the images of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery brought it all back and he texted a friend, another Black man, asking for space to talk. The friend’s answer, “whenever you’re ready to talk, man, I got you,” became the seed of his work creating those spaces for others. Audience members approached him afterward to say they felt seen. Youth groups asked him to bring the conversation to them.

“Society may label you before it listens to you. But you are more than what people assume about you,” says Leckie.

His return lands in the middle of BIPOC Mental Health Month, and that timing fits the work. Adrian Leckie, M.Ed., is a Leadership Development Expert and Youth Success Strategist who has spent more than a decade developing students and young leaders, and now leads Imani, a University of Toronto Scarborough program connecting Black youth across seven Scarborough schools to mentorship and pathways to higher education. His work centres on the young people, and especially the young men of colour, who learn to stay silent about what they carry. This time he competes on the theme of Identity, with a new speech about deciding that an old identity no longer gets to define him.

“I want people walking out of Lula Lounge with clarity. Clarity about an area in their life where they are being invited to be brave, where they may have been shrinking, staying quiet, or holding back parts of themselves in order to feel safe, accepted, or comfortable,” says Leckie.

Off the stage, that same instinct once made news of its own. In 2022, Adrian was honoured with a community award for his role in a life-saving intervention on the TTC.

Identity brings together ten speakers who will each deliver a five-minute speech about the moments that shaped their sense of self, the parts of themselves they hid, reclaimed, and finally owned. Four industry leaders judge the competition and help select the top speakers. Speakers compete for a prize package valued at up to $10,000, including $2,000 in cash, with the top performers advancing to the Grand Slam: Inspirational Speaking Finals later this year.