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OPPI recognizes today's planning students as the Registered Professional Planners (RPPs) of tomorrow and provides student members with scholarship opportunities that award academic excellence and community contributors.
Recipients announced
August 2025
Recognized during PlanON Awards
September 2025
Demonstrated in our ongoing work to make the planning profession in Ontario more inclusive and just, the OPPI Opportunity Scholarship is offered in acknowledgement of the financial barriers to education that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous and other racialized people. This scholarship aligns with the recommendations of OPPI’s Indigenous Planning Advisory Committee and OPPI’s Anti-Black Racism in Planning Task Force along with INSPIRE: OPPI Strategic Plan 2025. This scholarship may be awarded to an Indigenous, Black, or other racially marginalized person currently enrolled in an accredited planning program in Ontario. This scholarship is a one-time award of up to $5,000 and may be awarded to undergraduate or graduate planning students. Application Criteria:
The Ronald M. Keeble Undergraduate Scholarship assists in furthering planning education and recognizing undergraduate student members who are making a positive contribution to their communities. Application Criteria:
The Gerald Carrothers Memorial Graduate Scholarship assists in furthering planning education and recognizing graduate student members who are making a positive contribution to their communities. Application Criteria:
Southwest Ontario District Planning Student Scholarships are intended to promote excellence in relevant planning education, community service and personal achievement by student members of OPPI's Southwest District who are enrolled full-time in an accredited undergraduate or graduate university planning program for the academic year in which the application is made. The successful applicants will be selected on the basis of the following criteria:
To Apply for the Southwest District Ontario Planning Scholarship a letter of application with full return mailing address, email address, and phone number must be accompanied by:
Submission Deadline: Applications must be received by the Secretary-Treasurer of the SWOD-OPPI Educational Trust Foundation on or before November 1 each year.
Only complete applications will be considered. Up to two awards will be presented at the November meeting of the Southwestern District OPPI membership. Successful candidates must supply their social insurance number to the Secretary-Treasurer to obtain the award.
Secretary-Treasurer of the SWOD-OPPI Educational Trust Foundation Mr. Allan Rothwell, MCIP, RPP (Retired) 5251 Line 81 RR#4 Listowel, ON N4W 3G9 phone: 519.291.9898 email: allanfrothwell@gmail.com
To apply, students must fill out an online application form during the submission period, which includes a summary of up to 1000 words outlining how they meet the specific criteria of the scholarship they are applying to (applicable to all scholarship types).
Note that prior to receiving the scholarship, the recipient will be required to provide a certified academic transcript, and confirmation in writing from his or her planning school that he or she is enrolled in an OPPI-recognized undergraduate or graduate planning program for the academic year. The Outreach Committee evaluates submissions based on the above-noted selection criteria. It may elect not to choose an award winner for any given scholarship and/or may choose a runner-up to whom the scholarship may be awarded in the event that the first-choice recipient is found to be ineligible. Scholarship recipients will be announced within 60 days of the closing date for submissions. The winner will be profiled on OPPI’s website and OPPI’s social media channels. The winners will also be recognized at the 2025 PlanON Awards.
Dean Orr is a full-time farmer from King City, Ontario, producing organic and conventional grains, pasture-raised poultry, and maple syrup. Dean is an advocate for responsible land use planning and farmland protection; Ontario is shockingly losing 1% of its farmland, the best in Canada, every year to urban growth! He has published articles in the Ontario Farmer, delegated to numerous GTA municipal councils, and contributed as an expert witness to the recent soil health report prepared by the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. He is currently working towards his MSc in Rural Planning and Development at the University of Guelph. Dean's thesis aims to calculate the minimum farmland requirements necessary to support a population and explore methods for communities to achieve this minimum through measures like agricultural preserves. Dean's work will examine the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve, Ontario's first and only agricultural preserve, as a model.
Sam Goncalves-Horton is a third-year undergraduate planning student at the University of Waterloo. During his time in the planning program, he has made a concerted effort to contribute to and lead activism efforts within Kitchener-Waterloo. As a student and aspiring planner, he strongly believes that students have a responsibility to contribute positively to the communities that they call home during the course of their studies.
Through his interests in transportation planning, grassroots activism, and municipal politics, he has sought to improve outcomes around public transportation throughout Waterloo Region, working with various groups both on and off campus. Some of his notable achievements include heading campaigns to stop cuts to the ION LRT, stopping cuts to GRT bus service, advocating for the GRT Business Plan, and co-writing a motion to council that led to the creation of the Route 91 Night Bus.
In the future, Sam wishes to continue to explore as many sub-disciplines of planning as possible, and eventually hopes to zero in on a research question and earn a PhD.
Venus Cheung is a Master's candidate in Planning and Urban Development at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). Combining her planning education and architectural background, Venus is interested in how participatory design approaches enhance multicultural planning policies and practices, ultimately contributing to the well-being of diverse urban communities.
She has assisted in research about social and built care networks of immigrants living with dementia, their care partners and care workers, informal immigrant entrepreneurship and its role in strengthening equitable food system infrastructure, and the dynamics of transnationalism and mobility justice. She also focuses on overlooked narratives of the Filipino community and their network of care, agency, and resilience, both in Hong Kong and Canada. Building on her community activism work back in Hong Kong, she researched the Filipino diaspora in Canada and co-led 2025 Jane’s Walk Little Manila.
Entering her final year at TMU, her Major Research Project aims to integrate community-based knowledge into food system planning, to explore alternative narratives of resilience, and to spark spatial-oriented conversations about an integrative resilience approach for immigrant food insecurity. Her long-term goal is to work at the intersection of theory, research, and applied community work, enabling care, creativity, and collaboration in the city-making process.