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 agency; and through decades of public service, I’m fortunate to be recognized for my expertise and periodic creativity in policy and program development.

Over 2019 and into 2020, I transitioned from a Chief Program Officer role at Evergreen Canada to Executive Director, Smart Cities to lead the design and overall management of a new national program focused on urban innovation and data/technology solutions, across all provinces and territories in Canada. The team and I worked in partnership with our country’s top experts in Smart, spanning all major sectors, constructing a network and platform that now represents one of the world’s premier centres of excellence in Open Smart Cities. We refer to this large cluster of activities, and the people and relationships that bind them together, as the “Community Solution 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 toward 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 call “Future Cities Canada.” This is essentially a sub-brand identity operated by Evergreen but represents 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. 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, at times - restructured a big portion of the organization, and positioning Evergreen successfully as a national leader within Canada’s urban innovation agenda.

After COVID hit the world, over 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 a number of 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 high-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; community benefits; life cycle assessment and asset management, through ghg reduction lenses; and, community hubs are examples of policy and program areas that used to keep me up late at night, and destroyed my weekends for years. But all in a good way.

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 actually unique - and in many ways - has become a professional hallmark, weaving across my career, underpinning my values and approach to leadership. (Click here for my full civic resume.)

I currently serve 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.

I’ve definitely been involved in a lot of extra curricular 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 learnt a ton from Ann Cavoukian); and, because of my work in government, as well as my links to the 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 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 and 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 education timeline 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 (68 words); and click here for business portrait (high resolution) and click here for portrait (low resolution).