I am an urbanist, obsessed with the possibility of Canadian cities; I am a sustainability enthusiast, as a result of the climate crisis and a sense of personal responsibility; and through decades of public service, I’m fortunate to be recognized for my expertise in public sector leadership, and periodic creativity in policy and program design.

Over 2019 and into 2020 at Evergreen Canada, I transitioned from a Chief Program Officer role to Executive Director, Smart Cities, and led the design and overall management of a new national program focused on urban innovation and technology solutions. The team and I worked with top experts across the country, spanning all major sectors, constructing a network and platform that represented the world’s premier centre of excellence in “Open Smart Cities.” We referred to this large cluster of activities, and the people and relationships that bound them together, as the “Community Solutions Network.”

(Click here for information about Evergreen’s Community Solutions Network and click here for information about Open Smart Cities.)

We designed this national program to focus on place-based, people-focused approaches, and it followed on the heels of Evergreen Canada’s ambitious launch of a broad suite of additional innovation programs that are captured by the title or identity we called “Future Cities Canada.” This is essentially a collective impact program operated by Evergreen but represented the work and passion of thousands of participants and organizations.

(Click here for more about Evergreen and here for an introduction to Future Cities Canada.)

Over 2017-2020, Future Cities Canada programming and capital investments provided the highest revenue growth in our organization’s 33-year history: growing Evergreen’s revenue base by $25M+, over an approximate four-year period.

These substantive investments proved two major strategic assumptions: 1) Canadians increasingly prioritize urban innovation to help solve problems in our communities; and 2) there is a demand for national-scale and regional programs that prioritize “shared-value” approaches to advancing innovation at the local level (increasingly referred to as “community innovation”). These were assumptions we made but they were also major risks, because at the time this direction was uncertain. We took the risks and we pushed ourselves - pretty hard, actually - restructured a big portion of the organization, and positioned Evergreen successfully as a national leader within Canada’s urban innovation agenda.

Then COVID hit the world.

Over the pandemic period, 2020-21, Evergreen rebuilt and restructured our teams again, and my responsibilities were broadened through the concept of “government innovation.”

As Evergreen’s first Executive Director, Government Innovation, I am now responsible for advancing, supporting and reframing public sector innovation, through community-level, shared-value approaches, across Canada; and levering Evergreen's program portfolio to build new, cross-sectoral collaboration, unlocking opportunity to improve the wellbeing of residents and our planet.

(Click here for an article series describing our work in more detail.)

All of this has been exciting and highly rewarding: working to redefine public sector innovation through community-based, shared-value approaches has become one of the highlights of my career. And equally fulfilling has been gleaning substantive insights from our data and information collection. The resulting knowledge creation has allowed me to learn an incredible amount about Canadian communities and how we approach and realize innovation locally.

Prior to Evergreen, my career path has included several government and nonprofit leadership roles, often focusing on policy and program design, and execution.

Cities, sustainability, and innovation have been a near constant tying most of my career and passions together.

Before I transitioned back into nonprofit leadership roles at Evergreen Canada, I was a senior advisor to the Government of Ontario on capital planning and procurement policy matters. This was lots of pressure but exciting work, and took place during the largest infrastructure investment in the province's history ($190B over 13 years). It was in this context that I worked alongside many of Canada’s best thinkers and got to co-designed high-impact, innovative infrastructure programs across numerous strategic policy domains. Social purpose real estate and developing applied shared value frameworks; leveraging infrastructure projects to advance community benefits; driving life cycle assessment and asset management across government, through ghg reduction lenses; and, operationalizing “community hubs” and integrated service delivery, are a few examples of policy and program areas that used to keep me up late at night, and destroyed my weekends for a number of years. But all in a good way – wouldn’t have traded it for anything!

In addition to all this day job stuff, I have somehow also found time to establish what has now become a relatively long history of community service, civic leadership, and extensive non-profit governance experience. I’ve been very fortunate to have been invited to participate in and provide strategic advice to numerous boards and organizations. As I get older, I’m realizing that the breadth of my civic experience is quite unique in Canada; and in many ways, has become a professional hallmark of mine, underpinning my values and approach to leadership. (Click here for my full civic resume.)

I currently served as a proud board member and director on the Centretown Community Association (click here for website). I can go on and on about Centretown but I’ll just say that Centretown and Ottawa will always hold essentially “family status” in my life. That said, I now live in the Glebe, just south of Centretown, and contribute as a volunteer to the Glebe Community Association (check out our website here).

I’ve definitely been involved in a lot of extracurricular activities, at numerous levels. Too many to provide a full list here, however, I’ll mention a select few that I feel remain relevant in my life today. Working with an amazing group of local leaders, I was a founding board member of the Ottawa Centre EcoDistrict: an innovative, multi-sectoral partnership in the central business district of Canada's capital; during an internationally controversial, smart cities redevelopment project with Google, I contributed to the critical area of urban data governance as a former member of Sidewalk Toronto’s Privacy and Data Governance Working Group (and learned a ton from Ann Cavoukian); and, because of my work in government, as well as my links to the ongoing redevelopment of Evergreen Brick Works and its Future Cities Centre, I was invited to sit as a member of the Treasury Board of Canada’s Secretariat Low-Carbon Assets & Life Cycle Assessment Steering Committee. This one sounds a little technical but the work is foundational to establishing a true circular economy in Canada.

When you add it all up, this collection of design, leadership and community experiences help form unique policy and programming perspectives, and I’m often afforded opportunities to share and reflect in professional settings across Canada, and around the world. From Barcelona to New York, to Sydney to St. John’s, I fully enjoy speaking at conferences, universities and all kinds of events on matters of city building, community development, social infrastructure, placemaking, and urban innovation. As I “level up” over my career this travel has become crucial to ensuring my ideas, thinking and learning processes remain as advanced and informed as humanly possible.

Finally, I consider Ottawa my home and I’m a graduate of Memorial University. Memorial will always remain extremely special to me. My university education was intimately connected to building the person and professional described throughout this career biography.

Click here for a downloadable professional biography in Word format (161 words) or here (55 words); and click here for business portrait (high resolution) and click here for portrait (low resolution).