One Last Day
by Lindsay Stewart Glor

When Mac and Sherry Howe moved their young family to Winnipeg from Regina in 1960, they chose to build a house on Agassiz Drive, hoping that the proximity to the University of Manitoba might inspire their four children to pursue a university education.
Eldest daughter Debbie enrolled first in 1968.
She took a job on campus immediately after graduating with a bachelor of science in 1971, beginning her lifelong relationship with the U of M. Forty years later, on Sept. 14, 2012, Debbie McCallum descended the stairs of the university’s iconic administration building for the final time, ending an illustrious career that has left an indelible mark on the university campus and community.
Throughout her tenure at the U of M, McCallum served as research analyst in the campus planning office, executive assistant to the vice-president (administration), manager of the University of Manitoba Bookstore, director of University Centre Services, director of Ancillary Services, and associate vice-president (administration). In 2003, she was appointed vice-president (administration), a post she held until her retirement.
While she oversaw a number of different portfolios in her VP role, the university’s physical transformation remained an area of great interest for McCallum. “The idea of not being involved in campus planning activities is probably the hardest thing for me,” she told colleagues days
before her retirement. “Campus planning is where I started 40 years ago and now I feel as though I’ve come full circle.”
Over the course of the past 16 years, McCallum oversaw major construction projects at both university campuses, including the opening of the Apotex Centre at the Bannatyne campus in 2008. At the Fort Garry campus, she steered massive redevelopment efforts like Project Domino that spawned new campus addresses, such as the Pembina Hall residences in 2011. At the same time, she’s helped cement the U of M’s commitment to eco-friendly building practices: two Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED)-certified buildings exist on campus—Migizii Agamik (2008) and the ARTlab (2012)—with another planned for 2014, when the state-of-the-art Active Living Centre open its doors.
In the late 1990s, McCallum was the University’s liaison to the Pan Am Games, during which the university hosted the athlete’s village. With space running short, McCallum proposed the building of the Helen Glass Centre, which first served as temporary housing for athletes, before being turned into a new home for the Faculty of Nursing. Besides these brick and mortar projects, McCallum focused on improving the Fort Garry campus, pedestrian corridors and green spaces, as highlighted by her involvement in the annual Campus Beautification Day, and exemplified active living through her daily treks to Frank Kennedy for a workout, and her involvement with the annual Sneakers in Motion Day.

“Most of us will never make a contribution at one place as you have,” said President David Barnard on McCallum’s last day. “A contribution made through the work that you do and the spirit that you have. Through how much you have done and how much you have left us with.”

That contribution dwells in each and every building on campus, and lives on through the many transformative initiatives she championed, including the Resource Optimization and Service Enhancement (ROSE) Program, which is the largest project of its kind ever undertaken at the university. “I just want to say how proud I am of all we’ve accomplished over the last three years,” she told the ROSE team before her departure. “It really is transforming the university and creating a culture of change. It’s been a privilege for me to be a part of it.”
While the projects she led and supported will leave a lasting legacy, McCallum will long be remembered by staff and faculty from across the university, for her kindness, her integrity, her leadership and her approachability. “She is a highly effective leader who built a team with people who complemented her expertise,” said Joanne Dyer, who is director of the office of the vice-president (administration).
Former university president Emoke Szathmáry touched on what is sure to be another of McCallum’s legacies—her impeccable appearance and ready smile—during her remarks at McCallum’s retirement reception. “Debbie cannot help that genetics conferred in her brains as well as beauty, but she is responsible for developing the attributes that go along with them,” said Szathmáry. “She is known for doing what is right, what is just and what is fair. Her success begins and ends with the fact that she cares about the university and the people who work with the university.”
McCallum, who still lives near campus, says that she is eager to follow the university’s continued transformation. “This university has been my life since I was 17 and I love this place,” she told colleagues at the end of her emotional last day. Two weeks later, during her official retirement
reception, McCallum thanked her mentors, colleagues, friends and family for four decades of guidance and support. “It’s been quite a journey,” she said. “Mom and Dad, I hope you can see me, because I’ve finally graduated.”

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Why We Matter
by Jeremy Brooks [BA/98]




When the We Day juggernaut rolled into Winnipeg in late October, it lived up to the promotional hype that preceded it. Thousands of young people blasted through the doors at MTS Centre dressed in neon, carrying signs and shouting.
We Day is not a glorified field trip. The youth in attendance are invited because they have committed to doing something big or small that makes a positive impact in the world. They’re not at We Day expecting to be told that they are tomorrow’s hope. They’re there to celebrate the fact that they are today’s answer. For them, the prospect of studying at the U of M has shifted from strictly academic development to something greater: How will studying there, help me impact the world?
Tony Rogge [BA(Adv)/93] tries to answer this question everyday.
As director of the U of M’s Centre for International Students (ICS), Rogge and his team develop opportunities for international and internationally minded young people. Tito Daodu and Rebecca Kunzman are both involved with one of the centre’s offerings: the World W.I.S.E. (Work, Internship, Study, Exchange) program. Daodu traveled to Tanzania this past summer for a six-week service learning opportunity working with the staff of CPAR Tanzania (Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief ). She also won the Centre’s Nahlah Ayed Prize for Student Leadership and Global Citizenship. Kunzman is helping build connections and internationalize the U of M through her role as a volunteer World W.I.S.E. ambassador.
Rogge, who was at We Day, said the event affirms his view that the students the U of M attracts are not “a blank slate.” Because of this, the various service learning, exchange and volunteer programs created campus-wide have to offer experiences “that meet students where they already are and take them where they want to go.” Because to Rogge, experiential learning is not measured in one-off moments. “If it’s truly transformative; it’s not a once in a lifetime experience,” says Rogge. “It’s part of a lifetime of experiences.”
The university shares his view.
Here, students have the opportunity to travel and learn through 138 exchange agreements with institutions in 35 countries. They can spend their reading week in El Salvador, helping build a playground for an elementary school, or in their own backyard learning about social and economic justice issues in our city. There are more than 100 recognized groups on campus for students to pursue their passion in any field that interests them: community development, the arts, scientific discovery, leadership and entrepreneurship. And with the launch of the Co-Curricular Record in fall 2011, students can now have these activities formally recognized.
According to David Grad, who works in the office of student life, and is responsible for development of the co-curricular record this is a boon for CV, and cover letter development, even grad school applications. The office is developing a portal, titled Community Link, that will extend the capabilities of the program: it will not only capture what activities a given student was involved with while at university, it will describe any learned outcomes, such as the skill acquisition or professional development that resulted from the experience. In addition Community Link will create an online community that stores information about programs available on campus, enables students to identify their interests and find suitable opportunities based on them, and house any photos or public documents that describe what the club or activity is about.
Community Link, which launches in fall 2013, will eliminate a lot of the guesswork for students looking for opportunities to be engaged. “It’s a chance for students to actually find out what is available on campus,” says Grad. “Which doesn’t exist now.”

The We Day lanyard draped across Tito Daodu’s neck reads “talent”. Fresh from the stage, where she spoke to the 18,000-strong audience of young people, the humble fourth-year medicine student admits she was surprised to get so much attention. “I didn’t expect people to respond to my story,” says Daodu, 25. “I didn’t really think that anything I’d done was remarkable enough for a cheer.”
Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel laureate and former president of the Soviet Union, as well as other high-profile guests spoke before her, but Daodu shone just as bright in her spotlight moment.
She told the audience about her life’s journey from Africa to Winnipeg, and how seeing injustice at all points along the way inspired her to do something about it. She told them about a turning point early on in medical school, when she didn’t just think about doing something but actually did it. She made a cold call to a researcher in Nigeria after seeing a documentary on his team’s efforts to help children suffering from pneumonia. Daodu explained to the researcher that she wanted to join them in their fight. She soon found herself in her homeland working with this group and continues to assist them in their research.
She says this is just one of many life-affirming opportunities she’s had while at the U of M, all steps on a path that she feels will take her in whatever direction she chooses. When the thousands of kids at We Day put their hands together for Daodu, none of them could have possibly read what was typed on her lanyard; but judging by their applause, they already knew.






Rebecca Kunzman wears a knowing smile as she doles out U of M ‘Trailblazer’ buttons to crowds of excited students at We Day.
One year earlier, the University 1 student was in their shoes, a guest at We Day for her involvement with her high school’s Amnesty International group. Listening to their stories about why they came reminded her of the event’s significance. “It was an eye-opening experience to interact with so many youth from across Canada who were excited to attend the event, and inspired to take action as a result,” says Kunzman, whose long-term goal at the U of M is to study law at Robson Hall.
Kunzman came to the university in fall as a Leader of Tomorrow scholarship recipient; she wasted little time getting involved. This past summer, she was selected as a World W.I.S.E. ambassador, and in her first term on campus was elected president of the University 1 Student Council. Kunzman says she chose the U of M not simply for the “promise of a strong academic foundation” but because it offers students something quite rare: “endless opportunity for engagement and involvement.”

In addition to programs and clubs offered across campus, faculty members have, or are starting to, weave immersive opportunities into their curriculum. Archaeology professor Haskell Greenfield, and Interior design associate professor Kelley Beaverford [BID/92] are two such examples.



Haskel Greenfield’s method for wrapping his students heads around Tell es-Safi, an epic archaeological dig site in Israel that’s 50 metres tall, and covers an area about the size of the Fort Garry campus, is straightforward: he takes them there.
Walking “where ancients have walked”, his students probe the rocky layer cake of more than 5,000 years of history, from the Bronze Age to the time of the Crusaders—Something Greenfield could never duplicate from his lab (the Near Eastern and Biblical Archaeology Laboratory) in the basement of St. Paul’s College. “Wherever I’ve gone in the world, I bring my students with me,” says Greenfield, who was recruited to the University of Manitoba in 1989 to develop an archaeology program that focused on his passion: the ancient Old World. For the past five years, Greenfield and his students have visited Tell es-Safi, where a unique field school offers students from around the world and from all levels of education, including post-doctorate and high school, an opportunity at hands-on learning. Thanks to renewed and substantial funding ($2.7 million from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), Greenfield will spend another seven years there, students in tow. He will be using scientific techniques and equipment (such as high-tech three-dimensional laser scanning) to reconstruct what city life was like during the Early Bronze Age (2500-3600 BC).
The Israel experience brings Greenfield full circle in his profession.
At 19, his dream of being an archaeologist was cemented during a trip to his ancestral land to work on a project. However, he spent the bulk of his career excavating at other sites throughout Europe and Africa before the opportunity came up to return to Israel and excavate at Tell es-Safi.
The significance of the site, which among other things is believed to have been the biblical city of Gath, home of Goliath, has the same pull on his pupils. “You’re sitting there in the [excavation] trenches and you’re looking out and you can still see the siege trenches from the time the Arameans
came in the 9th century BC and you realize that there is history in the Bible. The ancient world comes alive; it is not some distant fantasy,” he says. “Your whole view of life changes when you encounter something like that. You can no longer take things for granted. And students end up working harder because they want to go back out [to Tell es-Safi].” The life-affirming impact of Greenfield’s immersive approach to learning is evident here on campus as well. Kent Fowler, an assistant professor in the department of anthropology and an expert on pottery from South Africa, is one of Greenfield’s former graduate students.
Greenfield knows that it’s the field, not the lab, which drives his students’ passion. He credits the University of Manitoba for encouraging him to build a program with this in mind. “Very few universities have that kind of attitude, where, they want people to just bring excitement to programs,” he says.


In-class discussions about her work overseas had long been part of Kelley Beaverford’s dialogue with students she taught in the Faculty of Architecture. But in 2005, 10 pupils who’d had just about enough banded together.
“They said, ‘Look, this is great. But we’re tired of hearing about things,’” recalls Beaverford, an assistant professor who teaches studio and history in the department of interior design. ‘“We want to go and we want to do something.’” They hounded Beaverford to create a community-based participatory project. It didn’t take much arm-twisting.
Prior to joining the U of M in 2003, Beaverford had lived and worked in Qatar, Sri Lanka and Uganda, and knew full well the power of immersing yourself in another culture. After a conversation with then dean David Witty, she decided on Turkey, where an opportunity existed to work with a small community rebuilding their 400-year-old bathhouse. The experience would ostensibly teach the students on-the-job skills. Beaverford also hoped that by sharing all 24 hours of their day with their Muslim hosts, the students would be able to debunk some of the biases they held about different cultures or religions, ones she says were largely fueled by the media at the time.
With that, the summer course: Service Learning in the Global Community was born. After a second year in Turkey, the program moved on to Uganda, Sri Lanka and Ghana; it has now been offered five times and garnered local and national awards and acclaim.
Regardless of where Beaverford takes students, the outcome is similar. Many of them set off from Canada with some notion of wanting to help a poor community, but the minute their overseas hosts open their hearts and their homes to them, it becomes clear this is a two-way exchange—of skills, of ideas and of culture—and a chance to build new friendships. “Somewhere in the middle [of the experience] they realize the building is the catalyst for interaction with people,” says Beaverford.

Seeking opportunities to enrich their lives and the lives of others doesn’t begin and end with We Day or the campus experience offered at the U of M. The goal of events and education built around experience is to remind students that if the spirit is in you, it’s always in you, waiting for the right time to emerge. As was the case for Deborah Danelley [DipArt/97], Fan Hong [BA/08] and Rachel Chen [BA/08]; their stories are below.

Artist and Ambassador
by Sarah Richards

Before Deborah Danelley became an artist, she worked at a company that sold software that helps people decide on a particular vocation.
“It was a program that allowed students to input information about themselves and their interests, and it would spew out different types of career options,” says Danelley.
Plugging away at her career in sales and training provided Danelley with lucrative work and an interesting job. Nevertheless, she says she felt unfulfilled—even unchallenged with her profession. As part of her work showing others how to use the software, Danelley took her company’s career diagnostic countless times. The software’s assessment: Danelley needed to be doing something more creative. Still, it took two rounds of company downsizing before life set Danelley on a different path. In 1990, she signed up to study an introductory art class at the University of Manitoba.
Since then, she’s shown her art across Canada, in the United States and in Cuba. She’s also been commissioned by clients like Victoria General Hospital. “Even to this day, it’s been 15 years since I graduated and I still kind of feel like I’m just getting going now,” says the Fort Rouge resident.
Much of Danelley’s work is driven in part by her passion for the textures and subtle colours of objects like used tea bags. She also deconstructs old books and incorporates their fragments into her art. Danelley is entranced by out-of-use books that have been weathered as they’ve passed from reader  to reader, like the used Mennoniteschool hardcovers she received as a donation. “I think things like that carry this energy—there’s a history to them already that you didn’t create,” she says. “The covers were so worn, damaged, beat up, shredded and stained. The inside covers had writing and scribble marks.”
Arnold Saper, Danelley’s former U of M printmaking teacher, says her work is physically affecting and layered with references. “She has a tremendous sensitivity to the material,” says Saper. “I don’t know if it’s always easy to explain … You get the feeling of ‘prairie’ in a lot of her work.”
Danelley says it took a while before she realized that many of her pieces have involved spine-like elements—such as the spines of disassembled books—complete with the emerging threads suggesting, perhaps, nerve endings. Looking back, she feels this may be unintentionally influenced by the fact that she lost a newborn son to spina bifida in 1987. Spina bifida is a congenital defect in which a foetus’s spine does not correctly develop. In its most severe form, it can leave an opening in the baby’s back from which the spinal cord and tissue protrude. “I didn’t try to make it happen; it just naturally seemed the direction I was going,” says Danelley of her artwork. “It went back to again, why was I on this path, going in to art?”
An affirmation of her career choice arrived in the most unlikely way. In 2008, she met Manuel Díaz Baldrich, a Cuban artist who was visiting Winnipeg to promote an exhibition he was part of. During their conversation, Baldrich told her about a community art initiative he’d started in his struggling Havana neighbourhood. Like the rest of the country, the area suffered economic hardship after the collapse of Cuba’s main trading partner, the Soviet Union. Baldrich felt those hardships led some locals to adopt a survival-of-the-fittest attitude—something he and another artist wanted to change. The project was named Muraleando, after the vibrant murals created by the group.
Baldrich’s excitement was contagious; Danelley ended up volunteering to provide some art workshops to the local kids. “I’d travelled a lot in the past on my own, but never to a foreign country where I didn’t know the language,” she says. She packed suitcases full of donated art supplies. Once there, she spent six days in Havana teaching children how to transform old books into their own three-dimensional works of art. “I cried every night because I was just so exhausted, overwhelmed and taken by the people and their gratitude,” recalls Danelley. Baldrich says Danelley’s fundraising and enthusiasm have helped sustain the group. “Every year, she’s organized a different workshop for children, women artists and seniors in our community,” says Baldrich. “Each workshop has had a different magic and charm and left a deep impression on us.”
In 2010, the Cuban government gifted the group a massive, 100-year-old concrete water tank. Since then, locals have been transforming it into the Muraleando headquarters. They’ve cut out windows, a door, added electricity and made an exterior courtyard for community festivities and to better receive visiting tourists. Danelley says all of it has been done through volunteered sweat and donations. She says the experience has answered any lingering question as to why she was led into a career in art. “I knew when I was in Havana that the art was giving me the connection.”
Danelley has been back every year since—always bringing with her suitcases full of donated art materials, sundries and clothes. That dedication has earned her a nickname: the ‘Canadian ambassador’ of Muraleando.

For Love and Fashion
Alumni-founded fashion label celebrates Chinese culture, helps put local youth on the path toward educational success
by Sarah Richards



Fan Hong and Rachel Chen are the first to admit it: partnering with traditional Chinese artisans to make items like hand-printed T-shirts could be considered a little unusual in an era of mass production. But if there’s one thing Hong and Chen didn’t want to do, it’s to run a clothing business like most others.
“I always wanted to create a business that was so special, it would attract all kinds of people and attention,” says Hong.
Hong and Chen first met at the University of Manitoba. Both were signed up for the same course—theory of macroeconomics—and, as it turned out, from the same city: Taipei, Taiwan. Although Chen was born in Taiwan, she moved to Canada when she was 15. Hong’s Canadian adventure started a little later, when he looked at a map and figured Winnipeg would be a nice place to live while studying economics.
After graduating from the U of M, the friends tossed around different entrepreneurial dreams. They’d studied alternative business structures and were impressed with fair-trade companies that tried to emphasize charity as much as the bottom line. “One day we were discussing different business models that exist nowadays, and we studied Toms shoes and thought: ‘maybe we could start something like that of our own?’” recalls Chen. Los Angeles-based Toms’ philanthropy consists of giving a pair of shoes to a disadvantaged child for every pair it sells. The company states that it has donated more than two million pairs around the world. Last year, it branched out into eyeglasses, providing vision care to the needy based on its eyewear sales.
Inspired, Chen and Hong decided to include a philanthropic aspect in their own company.
Founded in 2010, Dazi works with villagers in southwest China who specialize in wax printing, and uses their work to make shirts, baseball caps and scarves. “Fan came up with this idea about doing something different and meaningful,” says Chen. “Then he suggested that in Guizhou, China, some poor minorities could really use our help.” Hong already knew about the Miao; in China, they’re famous for their batik, an ancient dyeing technique in which natural wax is applied to cloth before the material is coloured with indigo dyes that have been extracted from plants. The fabric is then washed in hot water, which dissolves the wax and reveals the brilliant patterns and shapes created by the print maker. Batik fashion saw its heyday in the 1970s, and has since struggled to maintain its demand abroad. Hong says this, coupled with lack of opportunity in other types of work, has meant many young Miao must leave their villages—and with that, part of their cultural heritage—in search of employment in big cities.
Still, Hong says that in an odd way, those harsh conditions have in some ways helped batik survive. “Usually you can find batik in so-called “lesser developed” regions, but it’s because of this that this ancient method of colour dyeing has been preserved,” says Hong. “Every region has its own cultural prints and special patterns, plus the unique ‘ice cracking’ patterns—I guess that’s what makes it so special and beautiful. It’s kind of like a storyteller of culture, in some ways.”
Upon visiting Guizhou, Chen and Hong struck up a partnership with the batik master A-Ban Wang. (The name ‘Dazi,’ in fact, is a play off of ‘Danzhai,’ Wang’s home county.) The raw fabric is first processed in Taiwan, where Chen says they’ve been hiring older, unemployed women for the task. The material is then sent to China, where Wang oversees the printing. Dazi is also working with the Buyi, another minority that practices batik with their own recipes for wax and colour dyes. Hong says they hope to eventually grow their line to include more prints for caps and scarves, as well as possibly offering tote bags. In the meantime, they’ve kept their marketing costs low by promoting Dazi over social media.
Still, if there’s anything that Chen and Hong are particularly proud of, it’s their knapsack donation program. For every product the company sells, Dazi gives a disadvantaged kid a school backpack containing stationary like pens, a notebook and a pencil case. Dazi customers can even have their name printed on a ‘your friend’ donation nametag that comes on the backpack. “We want the kids to feel like the gift is from a friend,” explains Chen. As of last year, they’d distributed 50 backpacks to children in Taitung, a remote area of east Taiwan. For Chen, it may sound a little idealistic—but it’s not all about trendy threads and catwalks. “The central idea of Dazi is love and spreading love through fashion,” she says.

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Finding the Right Chemistry
How a summer job opportunity in a lab defined a career and cemented a lifelong friendship
by Marshall Wiebe


“Is there anyone here who doesn’t have a summer job yet?
This question, posed in a University of Manitoba classroom nearly 50 years ago, set a young Leonard Kruczynski [BSc (Hons)/65, PhD/71] on his future career in chemistry. The professor who made the query, Dr. Hyman Gesser, would not only find the young undergraduate student a job as a summer researcher in his lab at the U of M, he would also become a lifelong colleague and advisor. “I was feeling somewhat despondent and was worried about money,” Kruczynski recalls. “When Dr. Gesser asked if there was anyone in the class who didn’t have a summer job yet, I quickly raised my hand, no one else did. So started my career as a research scientist.”
Working in the lab that summer, Kruczynski was befriended by two graduate students who took him under their wings and showed him the ropes of research work. “They were good to me and I always remembered those days and those people,” Kruczynski says. “The boost in self confidence and the lessons I learned that summer stayed with me throughout my career.”
Kruczynski went on to acquire his PhD from the U of M in 1971 before going on to do a series of post doctorates in the United States and in Edmonton, Alta. He returned here in the mid-70s as a term instructor and, in a twist of fate, found himself conducting research with Dr. Gesser again. Kruczynksi looks back on this period fondly. “Working with Dr. Gesser were the most exciting times of my career,” Kruczynski says. “I published four or five research papers with Dr. Gesser during those sessions.” Now retired from the U of M, Kruczynski is giving back to the department of chemistry by establishing a student award in honour of his mentor. Kruczynski and his wife Doreen Smith [BA/69,MA/72, PhD/80] have also designated a portion of their estate to establish a graduate award in chemistry.
The Dr. H.D. Gesser Undergraduate Summer Research Award is intended to stimulate interest in research by providing undergraduate students with valuable experience in a research environment and to encourage them to undertake graduate studies. “I’d like the award to show students that research is exciting and lots of fun,” says Kruczynski. “Hopefully, this award will give undergraduates an opportunity to do research and see what it’s like and if they want to go on to grad school.”
Gesser, professor emeritus of chemistry at the university, expressed his surprise at being recognized in this fashion. The two men are still in contact and recently met for tea. “I was honoured,” Gesser says. “It was certainly something I never anticipated.” Now in his 90s, Gesser sees how this type of award plays an important role for the department and hopes it opens more doors for undergraduates. “These awards give students an opportunity to do something they might not have the opportunity to do,” he says. “It fills a hole in the education system.”

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Another (Busy) Day in Paradise
by Wendy Helfenbaum



When Donna Lowery finished her undergraduate degree in economics, she never dreamed that she’d end up a successful event producer at Atlantis Paradise Island, one of the world’s poshest resorts. Lowery ensures huge shows like the Miss Universe beauty pageant run smoothly, triple-checks that A-listers like Katy Perry and Bruno Mars are well taken care of, and keeps careful watch on production costs so that everything gets done on time and on budget. Just your typical number cruncher’s day job, right?
Well, not exactly.
“I do have a cool job, but it’s always crazy around here,” admits Lowery, whose team functions as an internal production company tied to hospitality; events are marketing-driven to boost occupancy at the resort.
Lowery’s path to Paradise Island involved her being in the right places at the right time with the right people, as opposed to having a precise vision for the future. Choices she made along the way ended up fitting together like a perfect little serendipitous puzzle. “I studied business because it seemed like the right thing to do,” says Lowery, who was born and raised in Winnipeg. “I loved U of M; it’s a fabulous school with a really good social program, so I had a great time there.”
After graduation, Lowery spent 18 months travelling throughout Australia and New Zealand before pursuing her MBA at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. “Then I did things backwards: I went into accounting after graduation, which most people do much earlier,” adds Lowery, who joined Coopers & Lybrand in Toronto as a junior audit member, earning her chartered accountant designation in 1993.
By 1995, she was ready for a major change.
“I looked into two options: transferring to Alaska or the Caribbean—the Caribbean won out,” says Lowery, who spent the next five years as an audit supervisor in St-Maarten. Lowery left the company in 2000, moving to Florida with a South African boat captain she later married. A headhunter found her an accounting job at Kerzner International, which owns resort properties around the world. And although her marriage didn’t work out, her new job exceeded her expectations. “People were shooting movies and TV shows and staging multimillion dollar events at Atlantis, and by 2003, Kerzner’s marketing department needed a production accountant to keep track of everything that fell outside their day-to-day accounting operations,” says Lowery. “I had worked on several projects with Michele Wiltshire, the director of special events, so she specifically requested me to assist.” Lowery’s first gig, a three-day shoot for daytime drama All My Children, featured a crazed gunman chasing the soap’s lead actress around the resort. “We had to go through all these security procedures with the Bahamian government to bring fake guns into the country,” recalls Lowery. “We also had a Bahamian officer on-set so our guests didn’t think anyone was running around shooting people. Since I wasn’t doing accounting all the time, I became a production assistant: getting water, driving actors in golf carts, and doing crowd control.” Learning on the job and loving every minute of it, Lowery took on more responsibility with each event, moving to the Bahamas permanently in 2006. When Kerzner launched the Atlantis LIVE Concert series in 2007, Lowery hit the ground running. “The first show we did was Duran Duran. I remember having no idea what we were doing,” says Lowery. “It was like, ‘OK, let’s turn the ballroom into a theatre; we need to drop the seats and figure out how to number them.’ My colleague Quinton was literally building the stage and finding equipment for the band. It was insane, but I’d finally found what I really wanted to do.” Lowery usually puts in 12-hour days, which stretch to 20 hours during events. “There’s no margin for error, especially when events are being televised,” she says. “One of the expressions within Kerzner is, ‘Good enough never is’; we live and breathe by that. The reward for good work is more work.”
Lowery’s team produced dozens more mega-concerts, featuring Sheryl Crow, Taylor Swift, and a then-unknown Justin Bieber. “Justin came in January 2010 to shoot a video; nobody knew who he was,” she says. “He was a nice kid, and we could barely get people to see him in our 400-seat theatre. He came back in June, and we sold out 3,500 seats instantly. He was rehearsing at the resort that week, and there were girls camping out, screaming, trying to find him. It was unbelievable.” Taking care of superstars like Brad Paisley, Jerry Seinfeld, Josh Groban and Kenny Chesney is more gruelling than glamourous, insists Lowery. Odd requests from performers? Check. One singer demanded white calla lilies delivered fresh each day; another insisted on having four bottles of peroxide in their dressing room at all times.  “It’s interesting; there’s always tequila on the rider list,” muses Lowery. “We’ve also had things like: ‘The limo driver cannot look in the rear-view mirror at the artist’, or ‘There can be no smell in the car of any kind’. This lady’s handler had to smell the car before she could be picked up, which meant we had to sniff it before that.” Lowery has also helped handle massive sporting events like the NCAA Battle4Atlantis Basketball Tournament, the Michael Douglas & Friends Charity Golf Tournament, and a Golf Channel reality show, Big Break Atlantis. “We used to do Michael Jordan’s Celebrity Golf Tournament, and all his friends were there, including Wayne Gretzky, and I remember thinking how exciting it was as a Canadian girl to have him there,” says Lowery, whose team of five operates out of ‘The Treehouse’ – a tiny windowless space above the hotel’s theatre.  “I know where a performer is at every moment, from when their plane lands to when they’re checking in,” she explains. “If I’m not there to greet them, I know who is. I know where they’re having dinner, and I make sure their parties are set. We have to pre-empt anything that could possibly go wrong.”
Lowery’s biggest challenge? Having a life outside the job. “It’s all-consuming, and I don’t get a lot of down time,” she admits. “Every time I try to plan a vacation, something comes up.” In 2008, Lowery helped organize a $20 million opening party for a new Atlantis property in Dubai, and another in Cape Town in 2010. “That was really cool, because they were filming Clint Eastwood’s Invictus with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, and all of them came to our event. I was working the door,” confides Lowery, who, at 5’4” and weighing 125 pounds, routinely turns away 300-plus pound football players if they don’t have their credentials. In the end, Lowery’s decision to study accounting was an excellent one.  “I chose to focus on finance and accounting because I knew it would travel well, and it’s allowed me to get here. Still, when I’m standing in the pouring rain at three in the morning while they’re shooting outside, and everything’s falling apart, I’m wondering, ‘Oh my God, this is my life; what am I doing?’ But you know what? I really like it.”

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 August 2012 (PDF)


Features
A Breath of Fresh Air
Happy Campers
PERColating Knowledge, Improving Pediatric Care
Leading Change By Example

Alumni Stories
A Man of Quality
Got Fruit, Will Share

A Breath of Fresh Air
Gerry Price, 2012 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient
by Sarah Richards

When you think of glamorous industries, chances are that the ventilation equipment business isn’t one of them.
Gerry Price knows that.
But as the chairman and CEO of the Price Group of companies, the Winnipeg-based manufacturer of heating, ventilation and air conditioning products, he also knows that something as simple as the air quality of a building is vital for the people who live or work there.
And as much as something so important can be easily overlooked, so too can Price. A successful business leader, Price nevertheless prizes modesty. When asked why he’s been awarded the 2012 University of Manitoba Distinguished Alumni Award, his answer is simple.
“I think it’s why they chose to nominate me that’s relevant, not why I think I was nominated,” says Price.
A quick consultation with award nominator and Faculty of Engineering Dean Emeritus Doug Ruth sheds some light on this. Ruth first met Price in 1967, when they were both studying mechanical engineering at the university.
“He is the role model, as far as I’m concerned,” says Ruth. “He’s academically smart, but he’s also street smart. He’s open, warm and true to his friends. It’s rare that you get that combination of a person who’s driven and who’s nice.”
That drive is clear. After obtaining his PhD in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics in the United States, Price worked as a scientist for the Defense Research Board in Alberta. In 1977, he joined the family ventilation equipment business founded by his father. Within a decade, Price was running the company. By the mid-1990s, he had bought out the company’s remaining shareholders in order to take full control of the firm.
“I kinda like being in charge of my own ship, if you like,” says Price. “I had ideas of what I wanted to do in the business, and I wasn’t sure others would be interested in taking the risk with me.”
One of those risks: expanding the business south of the border. It was a bold move; Price says the company lost a ‘ton of money’ for seven years.
“At the same time, our Canadian business entered into a deep recession,” says Price. “Because between 1987 and 1993, we lost two-thirds of our Canadian non-residential construction market. For a number of years, we had to find every considerable way to save money, keep the doors open, meet payroll and keep the business viable in Canada.”
Price attributes his company’s turnaround to many factors, including its strong research and development and rolling out new products with short lead times. He also says the company’s commitment to customer service and principle-based values helped it eventually break even.
“It’s a business model not practiced by very many companies,” says Price. “People give lip service to it, but very few actually execute on it.”
Ruth says Price’s dedication to keeping 800 employees as well as company headquarters in Winnipeg is nothing less than outstanding.
“What he’s done is move the manufacturing facilities to other places in the world, because that’s what you’ve got to do,” says Ruth. “But what he has [also] done, is he’s kept all the high-end—all the engineering, design, management—in Winnipeg.”
Today, Price owns or controls eight companies operating under the Price Group. Last year, those companies had sales of $331 million, 12 manufacturing sites and more than 2,200 employees.
Nevertheless, the 63-year-old continually evaluates his business, and himself, against other leaders in the market, always looking for an opportunity to learn.
“When you hear the great story of somebody with a new approach or some insight on leadership, or this-or-that, I capture it,” says Price. “I write notes, I clip articles. I’ve got files on leadership and things like this.”
Price is a driven, committed, individual, says Ruth—and that energy goes far beyond the office swivel chair. He volunteers for numerous non-profits, and has long been involved in helping U of M students better prepare for life in the work world through his involvement with the Faculty of Architecture Partners Program, the Asper School of Business Associates Program, the Faculty of Engineering Friends program and raising funds to build the university’s Engineering and Information Technology Complex.
 Many of Price’s donations are given quietly, below the radar. Money, he says, has never been an objective in his life, but rather a byproduct of a successful business.
 “You know, you’re not judged in life by what you have on your death bed,” says Price. “The legacy that counts is the people who have benefitted, loved and appreciated your being part of their life. That’s the only legacy that counts. Nothing else counts. Period.”
Of all his charitable endeavours, one remains most personal. 
The Travis Price Classic is an annual charity golf tournament held in memory of Price’s son, who died suddenly while playing hockey for St. Johns-Ravenscourt in 2004. Travis’s childhood friends conceived the event and Gerry is a member of the committee. In its first two years, the tournament raised $350,000 for Camp Brereton, an outdoor get away for kids of all abilities in the Whiteshell Park region that’s run by Variety, the children’s charity.
 The money helped build a new sports court at the camp, and a new camp lodge is scheduled for completion this fall. “Gerry is truly a leader in the community,” says Variety executive director Wayne Rogers. “He’s just a stellar human being.” 


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Happy Campers
How WISE Kidnetic Energy is helping turn kids on to science and engineering
by Sarah Richards




No remote community is too far.
It’s not quite the WISE Kidnetic Energy camp motto forteaching kids about science. But it could very well have been this past summer, as University of Manitoba student instructors fanned out across Manitoba.
“We really try and give rural communities the time and space to develop their youth and orient them to the fields of science and engineering,”says Nursraat Masood [BSc(CE)/04, MSc/10], WISE Kidnetic Energy’s
program administrator. “I think we’ve worked very hard to create positive energy towards these fields in the province of Manitoba.”
Started in 1990, WISE Kidnetic Energy is a non-profit with a mission: increasing the number of girls and other under-represented groups in the fields of science and engineering. During the school year, WISE instructors make science presentations based on the provincial school curriculum to kids in the Winnipeg region. Come summer, however, the instructors travel throughout the province to hold weeklong science summer camps.
This past summer, WISE instructors travelled to nearly 30 different camp locations, several of which were First Nations communities. The instructors logged major travel mileage, driving hours to get to locations like Norway House and flying in to northern towns like Churchill. Camp manager Tabitha Wasylyk says all of the kids they work
with share common characteristics: they’re excited, want to try new experiments, and have fun. But the most remote camp locations—the ones that require some serious hoofing to get to, including flying by prop plane—are a little special.
“When you go to communities that aren’t used to having people around from outside the community, it’s kinda a bigger deal for them,” says Wasylyk.
The organization works with nearly 30,000 students in a single year. All of the instructors are U of M science, engineering and education students, and the vast majority of them are female.“We’re not going into classrooms and taking the girls aside,” says Masood. “We’re hoping that because it’s a woman talking about science and engineering and inviting them to these fields that they’ll re-orient to perhaps thinking about entering these fields.”
Women and certain minorities remain stubbornly under-represented in the sciences. For instance, only 22 per cent of workers in the field of natural sciences, engineering and mathematics were female in 2009, according to Statistics Canada. Even more sobering is the fact that this figure barely changed over more than two decades. In 1987, women only comprised 20 per cent of the workers in these fields.
WISE is working to change that disparity. The summer camps emphasize hands-on learning through activities that help children understand things like simple mechanics. “We don’t want it to be anything like school,” admits Wasylyk. “We want it to be a fun camp, but one that’s still a learning environment.”
Instructors often dress up for the theme of the day. For the camp’s pirate ship building activity, that could mean wearing an eye patch and hat, or full-out pirate kit. The actual ship building starts with kids drawing blueprints while learning about how wind energy propels the sails and keels stabilize the ships. They then select the boat’s building materials—in this case, pop bottles, popsicle sticks, marbles, toothpicks, string and aluminum foil—and put
together their masterpiece.
Creating these scientific works of art, though fun, is anything but child’s play; it can trigger life-changing decisions, like it did for 22-year-old Michelle Carriere.
As a teenager, she attended one of WISE’s day camps as part of Manitoba Hydro’s Building the Circle, a summer career exploration camp for Aboriginal girls. Carriere says the entire experience made her switch from wanting a career in education to one in environmental engineering.
Today, Carriere indulges her love of teaching as a WISE summer camp instructor. “I hope to inspire more kids to go into more science-related [courses] and to just open their eyes to the possibilities of what’s out
there,” says Carriere.
Through her biosystems engineering studies at the U of M, she hopes to also give back to the world in an even bigger way. “I want to do waste and water treatment plants, and make sure that clean water is available for everyone around the world.”
Masood hopes instructors like Carriere will provide the missing link for a new generation of female scientists and engineers. At the U of M, enrolment of women in biosystems engineering this past academic year hit 54 per cent, a number she says represents a “critical mass.”
WISE’s contribution to this endeavour was recently honoured when the organization was awarded the 2011 Actua & GE Canada Award for its leadership and innovation. Actua is a non-profit network of 33 organizations located at Canadian universities and colleges that offer science programming for young people. Actua noted that one reason behind WISE’s award was its dedication and effort to offering its science programming to kids throughout
Manitoba, not just Winnipeg.
That sort of commitment costs money, however.
“As things get more expensive, especially to reach rural, isolated communities, our costs are growing,” says Masood.
The U of M’s Faculty of Engineering donates funds and office space to WISE, but the organization relies on outside donors as well. One of the current WISE plans to reach more kids is a proposed girls club for inner-city young people. WISE hopes to start that program in Winnipeg this fall.

For more information about WISE Kidnetic Energy, visit wisekidneticenergy.ca.

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PERColating Knowledge, Improving Pediatric Care
Dr. Terry Klassen is working to ensure kids visiting emergency rooms get the best care possible
by Sylviane Duval

Croup, bronchiolitis, and head injury—they are the most common causes of childhood visits to the emergency department and are often the scariest for parents. Yet for years doctors and nurses were not managing these ailments consistently across Canada.
Dr. Terry Klassen helped changed this.
In 1995, he came up with the idea to form a network of health professionals across Canada to conduct multicentre
research projects. This group, called Pediatric Emergency Research Canada (PERC), have since created greater consistency and improved care for kids arriving in ERs across the country. Their efforts were recently recognized as a top achievement in health research.
“I’ve had a career that impacts kids and families,” says Klassen, who is director of research at the Manitoba Institute of Child Health. “That’s a great thing, and I don’t take it for granted. I keep working to earn it and the gifts I’ve been given. It’s wonderful to sit back and be thankful.”
Klassen first came across a discrepancy in care while researching minor head injuries in kids arriving at emergency. He realized that one centre couldn’t recruit enough patients to provide sufficient context for his studies so he persuaded pediatric centres across Canada to submit their data on the issue—and was appalled to find that whether or not a child who had lost consciousness received a CT scan varied on a centre-by-centre basis. That study led to
a new rule, known as CATCH, or the Canadian Assessment of Tomography for Childhood Injury, which helps ER doctors decide under which conditions children need CT scans.
Klassen’s study became the first of his newly established PERC, which has since grown to 15 sites within teaching or pediatric hospitals nationwide.
PERC has made considerable improvements to how croup is treated around the world. Klassen’s research on this common respiratory condition found in kids, which targets the larynx and is characterized by a barky cough, began when he read a study showing that hospitalized children who received an intramuscular dose of dexamethasone (a steroid) were half as likely to need intubation and improved faster. He wondered if intervening sooner—at emergency, for instance—could prevent hospitalization altogether.
The Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, where Klassen worked at the time, launched a series of multi-centre, randomized studies through PERC that confirmed the result even for mild cases, but also revealed that smaller hospitals were less likely to use steroids than large ones.
Another study showed that dexamethasone, along with epinephrine—the generic name for the hormone adrenalin, which helps the body regulate heart rate, blood vessel and air passage diameters, as well as metabolic shifts—may act synergistically on children with bronchiolitis. The results, after a program of training, mentorship, and outreach to ensure that emergency pediatricians have the latest knowledge, were fewer admissions, lower healthcare costs, less stress on parents, and widespread adoption of the interventions.
For this body of research, Klassen and his team received one of the highly regarded Top Achievement in Health Research Awards in 2011 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Canadian Medical Association Journal for “improving health outcomes of acutely ill and injured children visiting pediatric emergency departments.” The awards are given to researchers whose achievements change the course of health care delivery.
“We’re proud of how far pediatric emergency has grown in Canada from being an unrecognized area of practice in the 80s to receiving a top research award and developing a body of knowledge that impacts patients,” says Klassen. “I feel privileged to have been along for the whole ride.”
The whole ride may not be quite over. In June, Klassen was nominated to CIHR’s governing council for a three-year term. He expects to advocate for research investment and for Manitoba’s ongoing representation in CIHR’s mandate.
Klassen remembers wanting to be a doctor since receiving his first medical kit at age four. As a youngster in Central America, where his family lived for a time during his childhood, he devoured the limited reading material in English—notably the popular “I Am Joe’s Body” series of articles in Reader’s Digest that explained
anatomy in layperson language.
He never waivered; he never went through the marine biologist or fireman phase. He knew he wanted to study medicine and did so at the University of Manitoba because, he says, of its clinical approach to issues and reputation for quality education. He considered internal medicine as a specialty, but pediatrics won him over.
Klassen acknowledges his experience in the ER fostered a parenting style focused on reducing the chance for injury. “Maybe my own kids found me irritating because they didn’t get a trampoline and had to wear bike helmets.”
As a professional, however, Klassen finds the distance he needs to examine a child, ask the parents questions, investigate the issue, respond and, at the same time, interact with the child at a much lighter level.
But the suppressed emotion over a poor outcome can be overwhelming. The devoted doctor still remembers the first time—during a case of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)—when he had to give parents bad news.
“We need to stand beside each other as humans and experience life together,” he says. “There’s no easy explanation as to ‘Why you, not me?’ Sad things happen. You try to figure out why kids have SIDS. Now we have knowledge that makes a difference. It’s motivating; it causes you to reflect and be fully human.”

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Leading Change By Example
Humanitarian Stephen Lewis reflects on life and his ongoing fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa
by Shamona Harnett [BA(Adv)/96]

Stephen Lewis can’t stop thinking about his recent trip to Calcutta’s red light district—a journey he compares to Danté’s version of hell
 “There’s a lot of smoke. There’s an intense poverty. The streets are littered with activity. It gives you an very unpleasant sense,” says Lewis, 74, the Toronto-based politician, diplomat and humanitarian who has made it his life’s mission to tackle HIV/AIDS around the world.
 “You’re walking through an oppressive corridor where clients are furtively seeking sex workers and sex workers are lined up on the street—and it all has an atmosphere that’s closer to Danté than Kafka.” 
Lewis, who Time Magazine named one of the 100 most influential people in the world, was in India pursuing his passions: fighting both AIDS and women’s oppression.  
 In 2003, the former leader of Ontario’s New Democratic Party launched the Steven Lewis Foundation—a charity that raises money for grassroots HIV/AIDS causes. But rather than toil about his cause from behind an office desk, Lewis leapt to the front lines to witness the chaos firsthand.
 In India, Lewis and a small entourage that included iconic American feminist Gloria Steinem, chatted with a few of the 11,000 sex workers in the area. He uncovered their stories as menacing pimps and landlords looked on. [removed second ‘their’ in this sentence.]
 Since then, Lewis admits he’s still haunted by what he saw during his first peek at Calcutta’s underbelly and notes he’s “shocked” that neither police nor the legal system in India seem interested in prosecuting rapists and johns. 
“I haven’t yet sorted it out in my mind, because it has been less than a month, how to respond other than outrage—how to respond more usefully.  But I will at some point. I’m just thinking it through.”
That’s why Lewis inspires so many:  he doesn’t just talk about the worlds’ problems. He attempts to do something about them. Even those who don’t subscribe to his left-of-centre views can’t help but be intrigued by his storytelling, an attention-grabbing blend of eloquence and razor-sharp diction 
 The author and Order of Canada recipient presented a series of lectures at the University of Manitoba in March. There was standing-room-only at Frederic Gaspard Theatre where hundreds of students gathered to hear him speak. Even the room next door was packed with an overflow of people glued to a video screen that broadcast his lecture in which he spoke about his wrenching experiences in Africa, AIDS progress around the world, banning the anti-homosexual laws that exist in the Caribbean, the AIDS epidemic in Canada’s Aboriginal community and some of the cutting-edge AIDS research happening in Manitoba.
 He encouraged young people to volunteer and advocate for what they believe in.
 He realizes he’s not going to change everyone who shows up to his speeches.“I’m pretty aware of the fact that in any audience… you’re only going to reinforce the natural instincts of a dozen or 15 people,” says Lewis. “I think it’s useful to raise awareness with everyone.  But you’re only going to have a small handful who want to go out and change the world.”
 “That justifies the whole engagement for me.”
 Lewis was one of the dozen or so people who decided long ago that he would make a difference. But it wasn’t a visiting lecturer who inspired him; it was his socialist/activist parents.  
 His father was the Polish-born David Lewis, former national secretary of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the labour movement party founded in the 1930s that later morphed into the NDP.  David eventually became national leader of the NDP.
 Lewis says he was just three years old when he helped his parents stuff envelopes for the CCF. He was indoctrinated at a young age—something that he jokes about now and clearly doesn’t regret. “I was steeped in a political family from birth. I’m sure they were forcing me to read Marx when I was two,” he says, laughing. “So it was quite natural that I would be interested in international things.”
 Lewis is particularly known for his work in Africa, where he’s visited countless times over the past 51 years.
 A 21-year-old Stephen Lewis was working for Socialist International in London when he got an invitation to attend a conference in Ghana. He went and stayed in Africa for more than a year, teaching at various schools.
 That started his love affair with a continent that drew him like a magnet to steel. 
 “It’s a throbbing, vital community—the continent of Africa,” says Lewis, who while teaching school in Africa had several wild adventures including driving across the continent with his best buddy from British Columbia and getting arrested and detained in Sudan where authorities accused him of espionage.
 “I was so overwhelmed by what I saw in Africa, so excited. All these countries were either coming to independence or newly independent. There was a tremendous spirit of hope and optimism and determination.”
 He left Africa when Tommy Douglas—now known as the father of Canada’s universal healthcare system—sent him a letter asking him to work for the fledgling NDP. “And when Tommy Douglas writes I obey,” says Lewis, coyly.
 Lewis was executive director of UNICEF in the mid to late 90s. From 2001 to 2006, he was appointed United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. During that time, ending apartheid in South Africa was on the UN agenda. “That feels good. To even be on the fringes of that struggle makes life worthwhile.”
 Today, he’s focusing on his foundation, which he runs with his daughter, Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, who serves as executive director.
 The father-of-three, grandfather and husband says he’s proud of his family, who happen to share his values. His son Avi, is a documentary maker and former host of the CBC television show Counterspin. Avi is married to Naomi Klein, author of the international bestseller No Logo, a book criticizing globalization. Lewis’s other daughter, Jenny, is a social activist and casting director. His wife is journalist Michele Landsberg, to whom he has been married for 49 years.
 “I’ve had a very, very good life,” says Lewis, who concedes that he constantly mulls over his travels and how he can help correct some of the wrongs he’s seen.
 There’s so much more he’d like to take on.
 “I still have good health and a hell of a lot of energy and I travel all the time and I’m not daunted by it. But I know that eventually things will slow down. The body slows.
 “I get irritated at the thought of time not being sufficient.”

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A Man of Quality
At 97 years young, Dr. Ken Williams continues to live by the code of accountability he developed decades earlier in the logging camps of British Columbia
by Christine Hanlon [BA/85, BEd/89]




Long before he was an internationally renowned expert on quality control and hospital administration, Ken Williams was a high school dropout climbing 200 feet to top a tree in a logging camp on the coast of British Columbia. His
formative experience as a high rigger— risking life and limb to install blocks and cables for pulling logs—shaped a lifelong passion for upholding standards of practice, accountability and both personal and collective responsibility.
In the bush, the safety of the entire crew depended on every member performing his job properly and responsibly. “I got my value structure there,” confirms the 97-year-old. “You were always in a world of accountability, even when you were just a working plug on a rigging gang.”
Nothing bothered Williams more than a preventable death or injury.
Failing to appropriately drive the spikes that anchored the steel lines to the stumps was as great a transgression as surgery without a preoperative report, a situation he would confront all-too-frequently many years later.
One bad accident was all it took to solidify his commitment to quality control and open a window to the world of medicine. Taking a shortcut while working in the Queen Charlotte Islands landed Williams in the hospital where a bush doctor convinced him a career in medicine was well within reach.
In the 1940s, thanks to the moral and financial support of four logging buddies, he completed high school by correspondence and applied to the University of Manitoba. By the time he was accepted to Medical School, Williams was married and soon to be a father.
After he received his MD in 1949, the family moved to Invermere in the backwoods of British Columbia, where Williams established a practice with his wife Joy as a nurse. Being the only doctor in the area, the pair tackled everything from poison ivy to appendectomies performed with makeshift surgical instruments fashioned from kitchen spoons and sewing needles. Then there was the odd veterinary call. Williams once had to remove a calf in pieces from a cow a farmer had bred too young.
In his spare time he hunted cougars with game warden Jack Mackill all through the east Kootenay of B.C., and was also active in community affairs.
Then in 1957, he decided to close his practice. The family—now with five children—relocated to New Haven, CT, so Williams could pursue a Master of Public Health at Yale University. Years on the board of the Canadian Medical Association (B.C. Division) had afforded a glimpse of hospital administration that convinced him he could make a greater difference by approaching medicine from that angle.
Little did he know that upon graduation he would spend a decade going from one hospital to the next “cleaning up messes”. It was in his first administrative position at Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital that he addressed the issue of patients undergoing surgery without a prior medical exam or recorded diagnosis.
Then came St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton, the first of several Catholic institutions that sought his help. During the transformation of the hospital into a modern, properly functioning health care centre, he met Dr. Vergil N. Slee who would later invite Williams to serve on the founding faculty of the University of Colorado’s Estes Park Conferences,
a renowned forum for advocating patient-centred health quality management and accountability.
“He was adamant that physicians should examine their practices in order to make necessary improvements and insure the highest quality care,” notes Slee.
The two continued their close association after Williams became Medical Director at St. John’s Hospital in Detroit. Alarmed at the pervasive racism among both the medical staff and community at large, Williams met the challenge head on. Only months before the city’s deadly race riots, Williams arranged for Dr. Martin Luther King to address the board of trustees, which, for the first time included one African-American member, the Superintendent of the Detroit School System.
“He and I took the gentleman to a medical staff affair at the very all white Grosse Pointe country club,” recalls Slee in a subsequent letter. “Ken simply ignored the club’s refusal of admittance… He would not take no for an answer when he knew he was right, and he usually was.”
That strong sense of social justice would continue to drive Williams in the coming years, tackling issues such as drunken surgeons—some even packing loaded guns in the operating room; doctors sexually interfering with post-operative patients; and a litany of violations, scandals and disregard for patient wellbeing.
“He certainly influenced the delivery of health care in the United States,” writes Terese Marie Perry, Sister of Mercy and an experienced hospital administrator who worked with Williams. “He worked steadfastly to communicate his message regarding responsibility for the quality of medical care provided in hospitals.” 
Williams spent several years with the Catholic Hospital Association, in charge of medical staff matters in their 600 hospitals in the U.S. and Canada. But, by the early 1970s he was tired of putting out fires and fighting with physicians who saw hospitals as their personal fiefdoms. In 1973, Williams decided to establish a private consulting practice focusing on board management in health care. Perhaps one of his greatest contributions to medical accountability was developing in trustees an appreciation for their responsibility vis-à-vis all hospital activities. His
publication, Beyond Responsibility to Accountability was rated highly by the American College of Hospital Administration.
His expertise took him throughout the U.S., and Canada, as well as into Mexico and South America. With the children grown, he and his wife looked forward to more travel from their new home base on a vineyard in the Napa Valley. Unfortunately, their early retirement plans fell through with the demise of the peso, taking with it their
significant investment in the Mexican market. For the next 10 years, the Williams divided their time between viticulture and more consulting/ troubleshooting in the medical world (including navigating Sacremento’s Sutter Hospital through a scandal involving an anaesthesiologist who had sexual relations with more than 100 unconscious patients). In 1982, Williams and Paul Donelly co-authored the book, Medical Care Quality and the Public Trust.
Retirement finally arrived in 1987, when the Williams returned to Victoria where Ken focused on caring for Joy who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Faced with gross violations of care at some of the facilities where she stayed—restraining patients in locked room or straitjackets—he lost no time in moving from anger to advocacy.
“Ken became a frequent visitor to the library, often seeking information on nursing home standards, quality assurance, accountability and patient advocacy,” notes Elizabeth Woodworth, Head Librarian at the B.C. Ministry of Health.
After his wife passed away, Williams pursued adventure with a vengeance. Adopting cargo ships and deep sea fishing vessels as his favoured mode of transportation, he traveled the world widely.
The University of Pittsburgh’s floating classroom was no exception. While navigating the globe, it had numerous mid-ocean mechanical breakdowns. Passengers consisted of both seniors and young students,
and safety became an issue. With Williams’s help they organized a protest, forcing the ship to unload in Singapore. “He was 78 and had no problem bonding with the 20-year-old college students,” recalls Justine Jez Boston, who remains a close friend.
Two decades later, his sense of social justice remains as sharp as ever, although it has been almost two years since he sailed the high seas. “Ken Williams is a man of honor and distinction,” writes Woodworth. “He has lived his life to the absolute maximum on all levels and has served humanity in many ways during his long and generous journey.”
Most of all, it is a story that started with commitment to a principle that resonates as clearly today as it did at the top of that spar tree more than 70 years ago.

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Got Fruit, Will Share
The bounty of overlooked backyard fruit in Winnipeg is staggering; alumna Getty Stewart wants to change this
by Sylviane Duval




Seeing bags full of rotting apples waiting for garbage pickup was the last straw for Getty Stewart. She already knew there were fruit trees galore—everything from plums to apricots—in her Winnipeg neighbourhood from playing I Spy games with her kids. The more trees they found and identified, however, the more she realized the fruit wasn’t being used.
“When I was growing up, my family foraged, hunted and canned for the winter,” says Stewart. “Seeing wasted fruit on the ground was just ghastly!”
Several months later, Stewart stumbled upon an article about fruit rescue initiatives in other cities, and shopped the idea of launching a similar project in Winnipeg. The established food organizations thought it was a great idea, but none had the resources to follow through. Stewart decided to run with it herself—and Fruit Share was born. That first year (2010), she and 10 friends picked and donated 1,600 pounds of fruit from 20 fruit owners to six organizations. Just two summers later and with the season still only part way through, the organization has flourished to 350 volunteers signed up to pick from 180 owners.
“At first, I thought the benefit was that charities and volunteers got fruit,” says Stewart. “But the real benefit is the sense of belonging and contributing to community. It’s about so much more than just fruit.”

For Stewart, Fruit Share has become a full-time volunteer labour of love—but the time commitment can be overwhelming. For 2012, the Winnipeg Foundation stepped up to the plate to fund a summer coordinator to manage the deluge of phone calls and day-to-day organization, and the Assiniboine Credit Union funded community education workshops on how to use, preserve and enjoy prairie fruit.
Along the way, Stewart learned that many owners do not have the time, interest or ability to keep up to their abundance, but they are all happy to see their fruit go to good use. Volunteers, on the other hand, don’t have their own fruit, but are eager to pick and use local produce. Some are experienced prairie-fruit lovers, others, especially young people, are keen but don’t know what to do.
“That’s where I got the idea for the Prairie Fruit Cookbook,” says Stewart. “It started out as a 40-page booklet on how to identify, harvest and share fruit in Winnipeg.”
As with most projects, that was only the beginning. As she was writing, people asked her to include recipes and preserving techniques, so she added information on storing, freezing, drying, cooking and baking with fruit harvested by Fruit Share. Soon came requests for recipes for strawberries, raspberries, plums, cherries and pears. A visit to friends in the country made her realize that she also had to include iconic prairie fruit such as saskatoons and chokecherries even though they are not commonly seen in urban yards. The book became a 226-page resource featuring 11 prairie fruit.
Friends and volunteers donated some recipes; others Stewart created, modified and tested herself (she concedes that the apple omelet didn’t work out, but she’s plugging away at it for the next edition). The book is an eclectic mix of traditional and modern preserving, baking and cooking. There’s gluten-free raspberry-almond cake, apple fruit leather, strawberry margarita jam, rhubarb barbecue sauce, saskatoon salsa and classics like cherry pie and apple crisp.
“I wanted to raise the profile and awareness of what exactly is around us and what is possible,” explains Stewart. “When my family and I walk along the river bank, we pick saskatoons and high bush cranberries. I keep telling the kids to leave some for other people, but nobody picks. Perhaps soon…”

Getty's recommended recipe: 
Beet & Apple Salad
Use up extra beets and apples in this stunning, colourful salad sent to me by my friend Theo Smit, from Alliston, Ont.

Beets 3-4
Apples 2 
Fresh Dill, chopped 1 tbsp (15 ml)
Olive Oil ⅓ cup (75 ml)
Red Wine Vinegar 2 tbsp (30 ml)
Dijon Mustard 1 tbsp (15 ml)
Honey 1 tbsp (15 ml)
Garlic Clove, crushed 1 
Caraway Seed 1 tsp (5 ml)
Salt and Pepper to taste to taste

1.Cook beets in boiling, salted water until tender. Peel and dice.
2.Wash, core and dice apples. DO NOT peel.
3.Mix beets, apples, and dill in salad bowl.
4.In large bowl, whisk together oil, vinegar, mustard, honey, garlic, and spices. Toss with beets and apples.
Makes: 4 servings

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April 2012

In this issue:
Wab Kinew wants Canadians to 'get over it'
>> Web bonus: Coleen Rajotte revisits the past to reshape the truth of today
How U of M researchers are tackling climate change
Farewell Peter Dueck
Marian Lowery feels on top of the world
The rebirth of Yiddish
A story sure to make you smile
AGM 2012 is June 25

December 2011



In this issue:
How U of M alumni, faculty, students and staff are building stronger communities on campus, and around the world
President Barnard on why we must be champions of social justice in our own backyard
Statement of Apology and Reconciliation to Indian Residential School Survivors
The U of M grads who keep pro athletes in peak performance condition
The 'rockumentarian' of the River City
Call for DAA and Board of Governor nominations
Ticket offers galore
U of M alumni in the Leg


August 2011

In this issue:
>> President David Barnard discusses the ‘trailblazing’ new branding campaign taking place at the University of Manitoba and invites everyone to join him Sept. 14, for the inaugural event of the Visionary Conversations speaker series: a panel discussion with some of the university’s leading minds titled Apocalypse or Utopia?
>> In the spirit of Homecoming, On Manitoba features a random list of reasons to come home to the U of M; what are some of yours?
>> At the depth of despair, the light of hope shone bright for the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes mountains in 1972. Learn how, four decades later, these survivors use their experience to inspire others in the face of adversity.
>> Friendships formed at the University of Manitoba can last a lifetime, like the one alumnus Fred Kuzyk has enjoyed for more than six decades with his Class of ’46 pals. Read Kuzyk’s reflections on this enduring bond, as well as how the group has given back to their alma mater.
>> Alumnus Wayne Stranger found his roots in his early 20s and uncovered the purpose of a gift that had perplexed him his entire childhood.  On Manitoba explores Stranger’s journey, as well as the art and teachings it has inspired.
>> Our 2011 Distinguished Alumni Award honoree, former Manitoba premier Howard Pawley, reflects on his two decades in politics in a shoot-from-the-hip     Q and A.

April 2011

In this issue
>> Exploring human rights through the work of U of M alumni and faculty
>> Don't miss your chance to say farewell to Tache Hall (May 6 and &)
>> Preserve your family treasures at the U of M
>> Bison sports season recap
>> Our architects are the 'coolest'

December 2010

In this issue
>> Katharina Stieffenhofer [BFA/96] discusses her debut documentary film and the life-changing gardening program it explores.
>> Mathematics instructor Darja Kalajdzievska [BSc(Maj)/05] injects a healthy dose of fun to her lesson plan.
>> Alumna Eddie Calisto Tavares [ExtEd/05] tapped her experiences as an immigrant to Canada to help create opportunities for others.
>> Paul Janzen [BEd/93] knows what it takes to turn an ad from forgettable to memorable. Learn about his journey from would-be teacher in Manitoba, to advertising ace in Manhattan.

August 2010

In this issue
>> Robert Kirbyson [BFA(Hons)/92] plumbs his well of childhood experience to create his cinematic vision
>> Fred Liang [BFA(Hons)/89] on how the U of M helped him find his way as an artist
>> Barbara Gehring [BEd/91] is one very funny girl
>> U of M researchers explore bacteria's role in the future of fuel
>> Four generations, five doctors, one medical school
>> Campus redevelopment kicks into high gear

Special Feature on Arctic Research at the University of Manitoba

April 2010

In this issue
>> Meet the University of Manitoba's new chancellor -- Harvey Secter [BComm/67, LLB/92]
>> Mark your calendars for Homecoming 2010 -- Sept. 22 to 26.
>> Belinda Bigold's [BFA(Hons)/92] Tinseltown treat
>> Save a life for $6? Debra Lefebvre [MPAdm/94] explains how.
>> A message from your Association president Karen Holden [BHEc/92]

Story Ideas and Feedback

Please contact Jeremy Brooks, Editor, at (204) 474-9946, or toll-free at 1-800-668-4908 or email alumni@umalumni.mb.ca

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