Hi,
We’re Mikaila and Jiun
We’re terrible at writing this page. This is our story.
There’s so much that goes into who someone is that reducing it to a few paragraphs feels impossible.
You can’t summarize a person in 250 words! But we’re going to try. Here’s a glimpse into who we are and how we ended up with The Villager.
Mikaila
I was born in Orillia but raised in Toronto, though my family has been in Orillia since the ’60s.
Growing up in Toronto, the world was at my finger tips. Experiences and adventure became part of who I was.
I developed a love of food from all cultures, music, dancing, theatre, sports, you name it. It didn’t matter what it was, I wanted to experience it all. What I’ve realized over the years is that it’s through these diverse experiences that I learn about others and also more about myself.
I love getting to know people beyond the superficial small talk. To learn about them at their core. I want to know what makes people tick – what motivates them, what makes them smile, what warms their heart or makes them feel special, their struggles too. I don’t just want everyone’s highlight reel like we see on social media. I love leaning into the truth and essence of something/someone. The gritty details, even the mundane ones, make up life’s moments. I value genuine deep connections with the world around me.
I feel like the only way to achieve that is to live life to its fullest. Jump into things with two feet and be open to the experience and learning. We only get to live our lives once and I want to make sure mine fills me with a sense of fulfillment, happiness and love.
Jiun
People have called me an old soul. I too often lean on the joke and say I was born at 50. Born and raised in Ecuador, South America, where I had typewriting class and handheld phones weren’t a thing until middle school. I love putting pen to paper, and write for fun daily. I listen to music from the ’30s and ’40s (and emo punk rock from my high school years). Mikaila and I even have a record player where we listen to music. Suffice to say, newspapers, magazines, and books were a big part of how I learned about the world growing up.
Living in an impoverished, technologically delayed country also taught me that community was essential to make it through life. My friends and I would often help each other buying food, handling problems, etc. I was always the person people would come to for help talking things through. My high school counselor saw this and suggested I go to university for psychology. I bought a Maclean’s magazine and looked at the top ranked universities in Canada. Chose the top one not knowing that the list was alphabetical, and ended up going to Acadia University where I met Mikaila and my life changed forever.
The analog habits, the soft skills, the understanding that connection matters: it all still drives how I work and live my life. For the past decade, I’ve been a marketing strategist helping businesses build relationships and trust first. I call it human marketing.
How The Villager Came To Be
Mikaila and I met during our freshman year of university and have been together ever since. We’ve been so many different versions of ourselves through that time that we’re nearly unrecognizable now compared to then.
We’ve built a resilience that only people who have worked together personally and professionally can accomplish after so many years. We’ve officially hit the point in life where we have been together longer than we lived apart.
That’s no small feat.
We attribute it to our shared values of growth and the stubborn ability to figure things out, even when things feel dire or impossible.
This resilience is what led us to buy The Villager in 2023. We had no journalism background, no media industry experience. Just a passion for writing, community, and experiencing life to the fullest.
We loved what Ellen Cohen had built and didn’t want it to disappear. So when she announced her retirement, we bought the business and set out to learn what it meant to own a magazine.
We relied on Ellen’s process for as long as we could, but we realized fairly early that we felt trapped.
A monthly magazine demands constant churning of content. There wasn’t time to find stories and actually learn about them. The business was mostly about hitting deadlines.
In 2024, we launched a podcast hoping it would help us find and tell stories at a better pace. But we released weekly episodes to match the monthly magazine cycle, only to find the same problem emerged. Deadlines became more important than content.
In early 2025, while reviewing the past year, we realized the world had fundamentally changed with the rise of AI.
AI content was being generated at lightning speed to feed algorithms, something we didn’t want to be part of. So we stopped asking ourselves “can it be made?” and started asking “is it worth making?”
That reframe changed how we viewed the entire business. We didn’t want speed to be the metric that mattered. We wanted quality, meaning, the ability to create something that couldn’t exist anywhere else.
We wanted to stop feeding the machine and start building something worth someone’s time. Something we could experience on our own terms.
What we’re building here with The Villager is how we approach everything.
Challenging the status quo. Moving away from what systems and technology want us to do.
Really looking at what is important to us and the future of our community, not only for us but for our children.
We invite you into our world, read more about our approach, and connect with us.
We’re glad to have you here.
— Jiun and Mikaila