ABOUT ADRIAN LECKIE
Building confident communicators, courageous leaders, and purpose-driven communities.
Adrian Leckie is a Toronto-based speaker, leadership coach, and educator with nearly a decade of experience helping students, emerging professionals, and organizations find their voice, build unshakeable confidence, and lead with real impact.
​
Drawing on his background in higher education, community development, and culturally grounded mentorship, Adrian creates experiences that are as practical as they are transformative. His work blends storytelling, the Hero's Journey, strengths-based development, and pop culture to meet people where they are — and move them forward.
​
He has developed flagship access and leadership programs for students at the University of Toronto, spoken at conferences and institutions across Canada, and built community initiatives that have impacted thousands of youth and young adults.
Adrian's Story
Growing up in a low-income neighbourhood with big aspirations, Adrian learned early that ambition without support only gets you so far. It was through his local community centre that something shifted. He saw firsthand what happened when people had access to programming, mentorship, and leaders who genuinely invested in them. That experience planted a seed: community-based intervention wasn't just helpful. It was transformative. And he wanted to be part of building it.
​
That conviction carried him into nearly a decade of work in higher education at the University of Toronto, where he showed up not behind a desk but in the thick of things. Student engagement, mentorship programs, community-building, leadership development. He watched brilliant young people, arriving on campus full of potential, navigate institutions that weren't originally built for them and quietly begin to shrink. Not because they weren't capable. Because nobody had handed them the map.
So Adrian started building the map with them.
​
He developed and led initiatives like the Imani Academic Mentorship Program, creating spaces where students at UTSC could explore post-secondary life, professional identity, and personal purpose, not as an afterthought, but as the main event. He facilitated workshops, designed programming, mentored hundreds of students, and showed up at every edge of the conversation, including the hard ones about identity, belonging, and what it means to lead as your full self.
​
And the whole time, he kept returning to one thing: story. The young man who didn't think his upbringing was worth talking about. The student who had never heard someone who looked like them on a stage. The emerging professional who was brilliant in private but silent in every room that counted.
​
When Adrian started helping people tell their stories, really tell them, everything changed. Confidence followed. Voice followed. Leadership followed.
​
That's when it became clear: This was a calling.
​
Adrian is also a speaker, a facilitator, an actor, a podcaster, and someone who grew up on 90s sitcoms, pop culture and the belief that every ordinary person carries an extraordinary story. He brings all of that into the room because the best leadership development is human, cultural, and meets people where they actually are.
%20(1).jpg)
Recognition & Milestones
-
Project Manager for Canada-wide initiative BLAC Out Hate in collaboration with the Black Legal Action Centre (2025)
-
Started series of adult and youth public speaking programs and showcases, helping participants build confidence, strengthen their voice, and share their stories with impact (2024)
Created the multi-faceted art and video installation “My Black Is” at the University of Toronto Scarborough for Black inclusion and celebration (2024).
-
Published “Breaking Ground: Black Student Transitions in Canadian Higher Education”, contributing to national conversations on Black student success and belonging (2024).
-
Recognized as a Speaker Slam Grand Slam competitor and placed 2nd in Speaker Slam’s “Belonging” competition.
-
Founder and host of Shades of Sixcess, a podcast highlighting racialized professionals, creators, and leaders redefining success.
-
Program Team Lead for student success programming through the Imani Academic Mentorship Program at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
-
Facilitates workshops and keynotes on confidence, leadership, mentorship, public speaking, and community-building.
-
Served in national student affairs leadership through the Canadian Association for University and College Student Services and contributed to mentorship programming for higher education professionals.
-
Recipient of the City of Toronto Community Leader Award (2022) and University of Toronto True Blue Award (2020).