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

At essence, I believe the challenge of human organization, in part caused from population growth and demographic change, is an existential problem we must work to solve.

And cities are the most practical unit of human organization to apply our solutions.

Their form, their governance, our understanding of how human behavioral patterns scale and change within them, all reside at the core of humanity’s solutions to growth.

Starting at a relatively young age, my life mission became clear: design and apply city-building solutions through positive projects that keep complexity contained and allow participation to anyone who is interested in creating a better future for people and our planet.

From building national policies within and across the Government of Canada, to advising the Government of Ontario on the innovation and leverage potential of our country’s infrastructure investments, to running for municipal office in Ottawa and trying to organize solutions at the community level, to finding my current home at Evergreen Canada and delivering a national suite of innovative city-building programming, I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to drive this mission forward.

Evergreen is where I am today and it is a special organization. It’s one of only a few at the centre of a multi-sectoral, city building dialogue in Canada. There are others, many excellent ones, but it’s not a long list – and Evergreen is unique one: because we build things. We pour concrete, we operationalize innovations in active construction projects, we have a planning and development department, like a municipality. I can go on but I’ll leave it there – if you’re interested click here for more about what we do, and what we build.

Going into 2019 at Evergreen, 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.” This included the launch of one of the only nonprofit-led, municipal and Indigenous focused, smart cities advisory services, active in every province and territory in Canada. 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’s ambitious launch of a broad suite of additional innovation programs that were 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 an overview and some of the history of Future Cities Canada. The founding partners included The McConnell Foundation (who provided the initial seed investment of approximately $4M), Community Foundations of Canada, Maison de l’innovation sociale, TD Bank Group, and later Suncor’s Energy Foundation joined as a core partner too. This all paralleled programming investments from Infrastructure Canada and Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and such a long list of other significant partners and investors.

Over 2017-2020, Future Cities Canada programming and capital investments provided the fastest revenue growth in our organization’s 34-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,” and then later, into 2025, further changing my work to focus on “community innovation” - moving from municipal governments and Indigenous communities, to eventually include numerous other actors, like SMEs and schoolboards, as well as universities and community stakeholders in general.

As Evergreen’s first Executive Director, Community Innovation, I remain responsible for advancing, supporting and reframing innovation, through community-level, shared-value approaches, across Canada; but I now have more time and resources to dedicate on building innovative projects, with communities and at Brick Works, our HQ, like launching one of Canada’s first “construction technology development sites.”

What a great gig.

All of this has been exciting and highly rewarding work. 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.

Here’s a link to a deep collection of OECD resources on the topic of government innovation; and here’s a link to a well curated collection of resources on the topic on community innovation from the Tamarack Institute.

Prior to Evergreen, my career path has included several government and nonprofit executive 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 personal passions together.

Before I transitioned back into a nonprofit leadership role at Evergreen, I advised Ontario’s Minister of Infrastructure on capital planning and procurement policy and held responsibility for the long-term infrastructure planning file in the office. This work continues to be the most comprehensive infrastructure planning initiative in Ontario's history—capturing approximately $190 billion of investment over 13 years—enacted through the Infrastructure for Jobs and Prosperity Act, 2015 and published as the Building better lives: Ontario’s Long-Term Infrastructure Plan, 2017. Besides the province of Quebec, and at the time, this was also the only legislated “LTIP” in Canadian political history. It was in this context that I worked alongside many of Canada’s best thinkers and got to co-design high-impact, innovative infrastructure programs across numerous strategic policy domains. Social purpose real estate and developing shared value frameworks, in the context of surplus property disposal (incl. the development of one of the country’s first “Surplus Property Transition Initiatives” - click here for more detail); bringing smart cities approaches into infrastructure planning, for another Ontario first; 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 all 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, grass-roots political and community organization, 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 have served many years as a proud board member and director on the Centretown Community Association (click here for website). I can talk a lot about my old neighbourhood 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 community, just south of Centretown, and hold a membership on 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. What sometimes feels like constant travel and networking, although it wears me down from time to time, 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. My university experience is intimately connected to building the person and professional described throughout this career narrative and biography.

Click here for a downloadable professional biography in Word format (275 words) or here (101 words); and click here for business portrait (high resolution) and click here for portrait (low resolution).