Advanced Leadership Training

Advanced Leadership Training

I believe there's a real difference between studying how government works and knowing how to actually deliver results within it. Rather than learning politics in the abstract, I recently earned a university credential through McMaster University's Faculty of Health Sciences, completing specialized training in Engagement and Partnering for People-Centred Care, sponsored by the Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Ontario Health Team. It's hands-on, university-level training in how to build accountable, transparent, community-led public programs, the exact governance work I already do on the boards I sit on.

Combined with decades running budgets and leading teams, this isn't knowledge I've simply collected, it's knowledge I've already put to use, and continue to put to use, in the board roles I hold, in presentations I've made for the FLA Ontario Health Team, and in my work as an Ambassador for that same team.

Co-designing programs alongside the people they're meant to serve isn't an abstract concept to me, it's how I already approach every board table I sit at. That's the same standard I'll bring to City Council: real engagement before a decision is made, not consultation after the fact.

This raises a broader question worth asking as you decide who to support this election: how much weight should a council give to experience where failure carried real, personal consequences, a missed payroll, a failed contract, a business that didn't survive a bad quarter, versus experience gained entirely within institutions and public roles? I don't think either kind of background disqualifies someone from serving. But I do believe a council benefits most when it isn't short on people who've had to answer, personally and immediately, for the outcomes of their own decisions. That's the perspective decades in business gave me, long before I ever sat on a governance board, and it's the one I'd bring to City Council.