So I chose not to continue with it. So I did some consulting. I worked for a contract at Disney down in LA, then I went up to New York to work for Ann Taylor to help them with opening their factory stores because at that time, they were just doing that kind of stuff. And I worked with a bridal company here in the Toronto area called Inez de Santo and which is kind of bespoke wedding gowns. And I worked with a couple of other small businesses to try and really help them form a business plan, which is when I took over the Chamber, being asked by the chair of their board at the time, who was a lawyer that I knew quite well, who worked with me at Tiger Brand. So he was the chair of the board of the chamber, and I loved Ross. And he said, what do you what do you think about running the chamber? I said, I don't know anything about running a chamber. He says, you know how to run a factory, Joan. You know how to run a chamber. I said, there's twelve people. I've got twelve hundred people. What? How are you gonna do this?

This is I'm just kind of interesting. I didn't know you ran the the chamber. I wouldn't even know what the job description of that is. Like, what what are they looking for in someone to run a chamber of commerce?

Why I took it on was because I loved Ross, and I thought working with him he was the chair of the board. Working with him would be a very interesting opportunity, and they needed a turnaround. It was in financial distress, and I'm good at balance sheet and financial stuff, so I thought, well, I certainly can help. But what it taught me, Amy, of all of the leadership lessons I've had, and this one is probably the one of the toughest ones, is that the chair of the board was not Ross Wells anymore. The chair of the board was a woman who had applied for the job, and they left her as chair of the board.

Oh, that couldn't have been a great start.

Oh, my goodness. And I didn't have any expectation, but I didn't have an expectation of bitterness, rivalry, anger. I didn't see it coming. I was blindsided by it. But it was the law of governance would be that would be absolutely a conflict right from the get go.

Yes.

And I was surprised that these very high level folks within the community didn't see that. I had been at the time on the board. Maybe I'm still on the board at Laurier at the time. I think I was. I was also on the board of, Canada's Technology Triangle. I was on the board of Core Mutual. So I was doing a lot of things on the side as well. I'd come off the board of Conestoga. I had a lot of board work experience, but I hadn't experienced the other side, the executive in the boardroom. That was a new experience for me, and I didn't expect it to be adversarial, and I didn't expect it to be quite as tricky, difficult. But when you work with someone that wants to see you fail, it's different than working with someone that just doesn't like you because you're their sister or they've got different ideas or or or. It was very different. So I learned a whole bunch of different lessons around strength, resiliency, fear, incredulous thoughts that might what? But I've set it aside to learn how to change a balance sheet, how to get a financial they didn't even have a they didn't have an an accounting firm that had credibility. So we added KPMG to the list, and I knew them through the Gore. So I added some of the strength of my contacts into that organization to help stabilize it and move it forward. I did it for two years. My husband broke his back, liming a tree at the cottage Oh. At the cottage at North Lake Joe Oh. Joseph in in, in the Muskoka area, south of Parry Sound, and he ended up in the hospital in Parry Sound for almost a month.

That's awful. I'm so sorry.

So it was a good exit time, but it was also the right thing to do because the leadership on the board, when it's bad, a nonprofit can be really bad. And that was one of the lessons that I learned from that one. More lessons to come in that world.

That's interesting because as the CEO, the health of the board is so important

Critical.

To that type of organization, but you don't have a lot of control over how the board is made up. So that's gotta be a challenge as well.

It is a challenge. It continues to be a challenge in the nonprofit sector because I have a lot of colleagues that that struggle with it, and and I know different. I struggle too. But what I learned a little bit about leading is listening because you also end up hearing different things from one time to the next. You hear somebody says this one thing, and as you know, listening can seek out those inconsistencies. And it teaches you, you need to be consistent in the message that you deliver. But I learned a lot of lessons in that job, and I thought I knew it all for thirty years of textiles.

Surprise.

Surprise is right. Surprise is right. But I learned then that there are some forms of female leadership, as you ask about the ceiling glass ceiling or cement ceiling as it's often referred to. It's also that some women are not great with women. It's not my style, I'm more of a hands up person, but there's some women in that early years where the air is pretty rarefied, there's not a lot of room for female leadership, so it's very coveted in that ladder get kicked out, not hand up. And I learned that. I learned it the hard way, but I learned it as something I would never do.

And that's good too. The more of us that don't do it, the better because we sort of expect the the male barrier that's normal for that. We we come up with ways to, you know, overcome those things. And sometimes the when you come up against what you mentioned with a female leader, it's it's a little more hurtful and surprising because you would expect the opposite.

And you see it yes. You do expect the opposite, but you also see it in organizations. And if you're not aware and really keep your senses really fine tuned, you will sometimes miss those long nuances. Because particularly in the nonprofit sector, there's a lot of women that work in this field. And they work in this field because they're compassionate often, because they have feelings of supporting a community or a cause or any of the things that we do, but they're lower paid.

Yes.

And it's a it's a really big mistake and a misnomer that charity work shouldn't be paid the same as others. It's very Calvinistic if you think about it. Mhmm. You know? But we struggle through it, and one of the mandates I had when I took on this combined role was to reduce the number of staff through attrition partly, through reorganizing jobs, but to pay less people more money.

Oh, wow. That's very refreshing. And have you had success with that?

Yes. I had forty two when I started. I have seventeen or eighteen depending with four students.

Congratulations.

So but it's partly the work of a of a factory. Well, you know, if you're working in the car business, you know the same thing. Efficiency is critical, but managing process, supply chain is a good part of it, but this is a different thing in the people side. You have to be lean, but you have to be smart and be efficient in the way you work. So I just applied those same kind of constraint theory work that I had done in a factory and added it to this. And this is my, I don't know, maybe fifth job. I'm not sure. I think it's my last. I don't know. But I

don't know. I'm not I don't believe that.

But I am building a strong organization that will that will succeed me. The challenge, of course, is I took it over just before a pandemic, which upended the whole concept of philanthropy. Yes. Philanthropy is a funny word. We talk about it in lots of ways, but what we don't think we see it in big numbers. We see a philanthropist as a very big, wealthy, private, you know, big company, big person, big family thing. But that's not what philanthropy is. Philanthropy is a little bit from a lot of people that make a community powerful and strong, and that's what United Way is. We have about eighty funded agencies that we support in the community. We're one of the organizations, probably the only organization, and it's a worldwide organization where people give a little bit. So the philanthropy model is a little bit off your paycheck, you hardly feel it, in fact you really don't, and you're contributing to something that makes you feel good. Giving makes you feel good. Even when you're working on a hockey charity, when you're selling tickets for something rather, it makes you actually feel proud and good. So one of the reasons that I took on this role coming out of healthcare funding was that I could see where so many things, small grassroots organizations, are falling through the cracks, and they are the backbone of our communities. We cannot ignore the fact that we have so many people coming in all the time. Canada is built on immigration. Good heavens. And we'll continue even though we have a bit of a slowdown at the moment. This is something that you had to be able to assimilate and understand. And that's what I hope to do when I got here to the United Way. It's such a shock to my system.

There you go. I agree. And I so let's talk a little bit more about the United Way because I think that most of us can recognize the United Way logo, and we understand that it's a charity.

Can you see all this behind me?

And look at love behind you, it's such a lovely media room. But I'm I'm not sure it's not always obvious what your purpose is. So what can you tell us a little bit what is the United Way, and how does it help communities like ours?

Well, the community has significant issues. Right? Mhmm. And it's a global movement of an of organizations that are deeply local. So we focus on where the biggest needs are, whether it is mental health today, not so much in the past in the same way but today, or shelter, or, or, or, we take a look at the organization, the community as a whole as opposed to one specific thing. So United Way is built as an organization that was built out of the post war world where it was called the community chest, where you would give a little bit to this fund that would then support the community. And it would be the red feather drive or all these things, and you'd see a thermometer in the middle of the city saying this is how much money you kind of were getting to. But what we did was we were we were pretty well the only thing. And small grassroots organizations didn't have a fundraising arm, we were their fundraising arm. We were the ones that raised the money that would create the grant. And there wasn't the same government support as there is today, but there was also nowhere for small organizations to come together past the church. So United Way was built on that in the 20s and 30s, and it was non partisan. It was given a chance to give an equal amount of support across the community. Today it's more complex. Today, all organizations do some fundraising on their own, not all, but some do, but that's never enough. And so we have a grant mechanism where people apply to a grant for four different particular quarters a year where we adjudicate those grant applications. And because we have a team of experts and volunteer, adjudicators, we are able to put the money where we think it'll make the big the biggest impact, and that's what we do. So if it's House of Friendship, for instance, where they're running very specific programs that they wouldn't be able to run without a United Way grant, then that's what we provide. Because cities and communities and government changed on up and down, and there's money, there's no money, you can't have it, you you apply for grant, you don't know. If you're in that world, you you'd know what I'm talking about. United Way is built on stability, but it's with huge challenge today. The challenge of a United Way workplace campaign is that the leader, the leaders are who make the difference, aren't standing up and saying, we collectively will do a United Way campaign this fall, and you can take ten dollars off your pay this for every two weeks, and you will contribute, and we will match it, and we will be a big partner and a strong supporter of our community. We thought that that would be a model that was appealing to people. But the pandemic hit, and a lot of the leaders decided they wouldn't. And the millennial generation said, you can't tell me as a leader who to give to. I wanna choose. If If I wanna give to the humane society, I will. But what it has illustrated is that less people give generally. So when leaders don't lead, there is less given out to the community. And this model was built on this idea of making sure that we could collect a lot of of small voices to make it one really big powerful voice. So that's what United Way is.

It's so interesting. There's a few things. So it is a a very different charitable model, but also I didn't know about the post war history. So that's such an interesting, piece of information. I I really didn't know that. So I that's, I think that's really neat how it came out of the war and it came out, you know, to provide for communities and that it was the only one and things have changed so much. And the other thing I found interesting is when you talk about charitable organizations and how much a leader in an organization can affect a charitable organization, I'm not sure many people view it like that. And maybe the people that are leading today don't even know that they have the power in their voice to do that, I wonder.

They do. I I mean, it I don't know. The leaders today are slightly different. But my one of my first experiences with with Bob Astley, and he at the time was the president of, Mutual, and the Mutual was a mutual life insurance company and provided benefits, and it had mutual shareholders. So that mutual organization demutualized and became, Clarica, and then Clarica was taken over by Sun Life. The leaders at Clarica or Sun Life were the ones that would say to their employees, this is what we do as an organization. You are a big voice. And Bob, I got to know a little bit from through other ways, but he was a leader. And he taught me a little bit about the power of charity, the power of philanthropy, and how important it is. It nonprofits, they are the biggest employer in Canada.

Interesting. That makes sense. Yeah.