Enabling the funding the make communities better

Professional and Corporate
Written By Stuart McNish

Guest: Dara Parker (VP of grants at a charitable organization)

As far as Dara Parker is concerned, she has her dream job. As the vice-president of grants and community initiatives at the Vancouver Foundation, her mission is to distribute the funding to make communities better. Throughout her career, she has worked with people and found that understanding people is fundamental to growing as a person and her current role.

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Trusting your people to move the business forward
Trusting your people to move the business forward

Todd Yuen is the president of Beedie Industrial and responsible for property management and construction across Canada. As a self-admitted “micro-manager,” he has learned to trust people around him to move the business forward, while he goes out to external stakeholders and makes connections. And this is especially important, as an operation which tends to make things happen quickly.

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Human resources’ role in every department of every organization
Human resources’ role in every department of every organization

“HR has a place in every department of every organization” because there are people in them, according to Kevin Howlett. As a human resources professional, managing people’s roles at work is the core of what he does, on top of having difficult conversations, reintegrating them into the workforce, and more. Before retiring from Air Canada, he had to oversee over 40,000 employees around the world – he had to learn to be efficient to survive in this nonstop 24/7 job.

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A well-oiled machine: Recruiting and running a great team
A well-oiled machine: Recruiting and running a great team

As the co-founder and CEO of Tru Earth, Brad Liski has to make sure the entire operation runs smoothly. This can mean putting together a leadership team that knows how to run everything even better than he can – and putting trust in them. This is a far cry from where finance and stockbroking, which was his original field of interest. Oddly enough, Brad thinks it was him being a bad employee and wanting to set his own destiny which drew him to become an entrepreneur, leading him to co-found Tru Earth, which makes eco-friendly laundry products.

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Being dependable and capable of solving hard problems
Being dependable and capable of solving hard problems

Kim Haakstad’s job takes her all over the place. As CEO of the BC Council of Forest Industries, she represents the interests of British Columbia’s forestry product providers. Every day is different, especially with the timing of issues like US tariffs – all her life, people have depended on her to solve hard problems, which made her ideal for the role.

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Stuart McNish
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Growing a clean-tech accelerator and leading a team
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Giving yourself to others and learning from each other