This blog reflects the professional and personal thoughts of Jane Garthson, and is intended to help people make wise choices for themselves and their organizations about how to serve, lead and operate. Jane welcomes your added thoughts, challenges and different perspectives; please comment on blogs that resonate with you.
It’s been inactive for too long; the plan now is for two a month in 2024. Topic suggestions welcome!
Jane’s concepts are based on her lived experience, including:
- Over 30 years of providing leadership services to charities, associations and government agencies, primarily governance, strategic planning and ethics;
- Being Interim CEO of a nonprofit and Interim Executive Director of a charity and of a sports governing body;
- 4 years governing and regulating the Ontario horse racing industry, as a government appointee, including sitting on Tribunals and making rulings based on administrative law;
- 21 years of public service, in six ministries of the Ontario government, including senior management roles in Crown Agency Relations and in Financial Management and Planning;
- Officer, chair and committee chair experience on a number of not-for-profit boards, including co-founding the Ethics Practitioners Association of Canada; currently Secretary of the Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust;
- Ongoing volunteer experience in a number of other roles and organizations, with the longest being direct service with young people with cognitive and physical challenges. Currently volunteering with Amnesty International Canada, Seniors for Climate Action Now! and periodically with Toronto Foundation;
- Graduate of the Interim Executives Academy
- 10 months of university training in Voluntary Sector Leadership, with an honours certificate;
- A lifetime of active learning from organizations such as Third Sector Company, Creating the Future, Maytree, Canadian Society of Association Executives, Institute of Corporate Directors, Ontario Nonprofit Network, Centre for Social Innovation, Alliance for Nonprofit Management and many more;
- Growing up in a small town in a family with strong agricultural roots and continuing to spend time in rural Ontario about twice a week, as well as maintaining a pesticide-free edible garden in North York;
- Choosing to live in, and greatly enjoy, the most diverse city in the world;
- Being part of wonderful, mostly online, communities of people who want to change the world, consultants to nonprofits, music-lovers who create and make the fan music of fantasy and science fiction, as well as being avid readers of same;
- Being loved by and married to a kind, talented, intelligent, creative guy with an interesting sense of humour.