How Lyft ride codes are helping Toronto's TH3RDSPACE remove one more barrier for youth on the move

There's a moment Sumeya l remembers clearly. It was December, an event called Handle With Care — a women-only evening held at TH3RDSPACE's downtown Toronto location, designed for reflection, goal-setting, and community before the new year. Women traveled in from across the GTA: from Newmarket, from Lawrence Heights, from the far west end of the city. The theme was “arrival” — not just physical arrival, but the kind that happens when you let yourself exhale and take stock of how far you've come.

The event ran until 10 p.m.

"Being able to know that they have a way of getting to and from their destination was something that I found very impactful," says Sumeya, a co-founder of TH3RDSPACE. "They were more relaxed. They weren't focused on ‘how am I going to get home,’ ‘what line do I take,’ ‘where do I transfer.’ They were just... present."

That presence — that ability to be fully in the room — is exactly what TH3RDSPACE was built for.

Founded when Sumeya was just 19 years old, alongside co-founders Zenah Hussun and Ladan Afkul, TH3RDSPACE is a youth organization tucked into the heart of downtown Toronto at Queen and Spadina. Its location is no accident. The founders chose the downtown core strategically — close to Union Station, close to Osgoode Station, positioned as a midpoint for young people traveling in by GO train and TTC from Scarborough, Brampton, Burlington, North York, and beyond. The team itself reflects that geography: nearly everyone commutes in from a different corner of the city, and they built the organization with a lived understanding of what that commute costs — in time, in money, in energy.

TH3RDSPACE serves youth within the GTA primarily Black and racialized, ages 16 to 26. Its flagship program, Building Bridges, supports participants between 18 and 26 as they navigate career transitions, higher education, and early adulthood. A newer program, Building Blocks, catches young people even earlier — 16 to 20 — at the moment they're leaving high school and don't yet know what comes next. Both programs are built around a simple premise: that access to knowledge and community should not depend on the zip code you were born into.

"A lot of the youth who are trying to get into certain niches are coming from areas where those opportunities are more scarce," Sumeya explains.

It's a distinction worth pausing on. Toronto's outer boroughs — Scarborough, Etobicoke, Rexdale, North York — were built for cars. Wide arterial roads, limited subway coverage, buses that require two or three transfers before you reach a station. For a young person without a vehicle, getting to where the opportunities are means navigating a system that wasn't designed with them in mind. And for many, the psychological weight of that commute — especially late at night, especially in winter — quietly becomes a reason not to go.

The barriers TH3RDSPACE addresses are always layered. There's the obvious stuff: not knowing which programs exist, not having professional contacts, not seeing people who look like you in the industries you're curious about. But underneath all of it, often, is something more fundamental: the simple difficulty of getting somewhere.

Through a partnership with The King's Trust Canada (TKTC) — which directly supports TH3RDSPACE’s Building Blocks program — the organization has been able to extend Lyft ride codes to participants. The codes aren't used to shuttle youth to job interviews or mentorship appointments, at least not yet. Mostly, they're used the way Sumeya describes: at the end of a long evening, when programming runs late and the trains feel far away, the codes give participants a way home that doesn't require them to spend the last hour of a meaningful night calculating transfers.

It changes the energy in the room.

"They were more relaxed in the actual session itself," Sumeya says. 

For a program built on presence and trust — on the idea that real growth happens when people feel safe enough to be honest — that shift matters more than it might seem. The first few weeks of Building Bridges are spent almost entirely on relationship-building, on meeting youth where they are before offering them anything resembling advice or direction. You can't do that work with a room full of people watching the clock. When young people aren’t calculating their commute time, they have more brain space to imagine and dream—and co-create programs and projects that can scale impact, a big part of the partnership between TH3RDSPACE and TKTC.

It's the same thing TH3RDSPACE is doing with transportation, in its own way. Not solving the problem of car ownership or overhauling the transit grid, but removing one specific friction point so that possibility stays within reach. So that a young woman from Newmarket can get home after a night of setting intentions for her future. So that a kid from Scarborough doesn't talk himself out of attending a workshop because the commute home feels like too much.

Sumeya grew up in Scarborough. She knows that feeling intimately.

TH3RDSPACE is still young, still growing, still figuring out how to scale what they've built. But the philosophy is already fully formed: meet people where they are, remove what you can remove, and then get out of the way and let them show you what they're capable of.

Sometimes that means a mentor with a 3D printer and the patience to teach. Sometimes it means a night of honest conversation and community in a room downtown. And sometimes, it means making sure everyone in that room can get home.