Who is Raquel Ness?

My name is Raquel Ness, I am born and raised in Orillia, I’m a lawyer here – I own my own law firm called Ness Law – and I’m also a huge philanthropist.

So you were born in Orillia, and did you go to school here?

I did!

What was it like growing up in Orillia, what are your memories as a child?

As a child, it was actually pretty enjoyable. We are big boaters so being around the water was incredibly important. We had an ability where we lived a little bit out of town and we had a bit of land, so that allowed for some exploring.

But then we’re also very fortunate that we had the very small town community feel of Orillia. It was very safe, it was quite different growing up then than it is probably now in my opinion. In the sense that we were able to play on the streets until the street lights came on, and walk downtown from school and never were concerned about anything as far as a threat, or anything ever happening to us.

How do you think it’s changed since then?

Maybe not so much in Orillia, but just given the fact of social media and the awareness. There’s so much more threat I think that’s out there because of social media and parents seem to be, from my opinion, a lot more concerned about their children’s safety, or just maybe the awareness that there is unfortunately some dark lurking areas.