Offline.now Named Canada’s New GDU Ambassador. Come Help Us Build It.

By Eli Singer, CEO Offline.Now

Big news for digital wellness in Canada. Offline.now has been named the Canadian Ambassador for the Global Day of Unplugging (GDU), the international movement helping people build healthier screen habits.

GDU is a community-led movement working year-round, spanning over 20 countries and six continents, reaching hundreds of thousands of participants each year.

The Unplugged Village program is GDU’s year-round initiative and the official network of community-led hubs, ranging from neighborhoods and organizations to entire municipalities. Canada is now stepping into that movement formally, and we’re looking to build something here that hosts Gatherings throughout the year.

Our emerging vision for Canada

Canadian parents, teachers, clinicians, researchers, coaches, social workers and everyday people are doing real work on this every day, often in their own homes, practices, local schools, and communities, often with local and narrow reach. There hasn’t been a shared Canadian community platform where all this work can come together, year-round, focused on what helps people in real life.

Our role as Ambassador is to hold that space open. To bring practitioners, organizations, and community partners into the same conversation, and to support the kind of bottom-up, real-world work that actually moves the needle.

Why me and Offline.now?

I was early into the social web. I founded CaseCamp, Canada’s first social media conference, and produced Social Media Week Toronto, which grew to 10,000+ participants. I built the first global social strategies for brands like Coca-Cola, Ford, and the Museum of Modern Art. I watched the web shift from community building to attention harvesting, and over the last several years I’ve been immersed in the coaching, ADHD, and screen-habit space, helping people find balance with the tools I helped popularize.

Offline.now is the platform built from that arc. My book, Offline.now: A Practical Guide to Healthy Digital Balance, lays out our core methodology. The Offline.now Matrix translates established behaviour-change research (HAPA) into a simple framework that meets people where they are. The framework itself traces back to my early career as lead researcher on The Power of the 2×2 Matrix, the bestselling business strategy textbook. And the directory of practitioners is the growing collective of coaches, therapists, social workers, and clinicians doing this work across Canada and beyond.

For the last year, I’ve been building Offline.now inside U of T’s H2i Accelerator at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. The medical-school setting matters: it grounds the work in clinical seriousness without making it clinical-only. The platform is rigorous, but it’s built for everyday people.

I’m not presenting myself as the clinical expert, the research expert, or the policy expert. I’m the convener, sharing tools and strategies that are practical and work in people’s real lives. My role is to bring people together, because collective impact and community conversation move further than any single voice ever can.

A welcome from the Unplug Collaborative

“It takes a village to raise a healthy digital generation. We are thrilled to welcome Offline.now and its founder Eli Singer as our Canadian Ambassador for the Global Day of Unplugging.”

Claudia Erickson, Co-Founder, Unplug Collaborative

Screen Life, May 28

Our first public moment is already on the calendar. Screen Life is a free morning workshop at U of T’s Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus on Thursday May 28, with seven curated voices on the topics with the highest real-world demand: adult ADHD and screens, intimacy in the screen age, doom-scrolling, parenting, focus, burnout, and AI. It’s held during Toronto Tech Week, and it’s the first Canadian Unplugged Gathering, in a sense. A prototype of what comes next.

How to join

If you’re a practitioner working in this space (coach, therapist, social worker, clinician), join the directory. Free, no fees.

If you’re an organization, researcher, or community group with work to share, or interested in collaborating on Canadian Gatherings and programming, email me directly at eli@offline.now.

If you’re an individual who wants to be part of this, register for Screen Life on May 28. More Gatherings throughout the year are in the works.

Canada has the people, the experience, and now the international platform to build something good here. Year-round, bottom-up, in real life.

The door is open. Come help us build it.

This article originally published on the Offline.Now blog