For most people, moving your family from Ottawa to Vancouver would be a challenge.
But compared with some of the other places Kevin McCort has moved to, it was no big deal.
During his 20-year career in international aid with CARE Canada (the last six as CEO), McCort regularly shuttled back and forth between Ottawa and Africa.
His oldest son was born in Zambia; the family also called Zimbabwe home.
Throughout the 1990s, he worked in conflict zones like Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti.
Despite the intensity of that work, his leadership style can be described as quiet and thoughtful, said Vancouver Foundation board member Miranda Lam.
"He knows very intimately what is required to build community," said Lam, a partner at McCarthy Tetrault LLP.
"I think that's what excited us most as a board, because we've identified that loneliness and isolation is a factor here in Vancouver."
McCort, 48, has now given up a life of adventure for what some might see as a more sedate position at the helm of the Vancouver Foundation, Canada's largest community foundation. But McCort doesn't see it that way.
"For me, the prospects of making a shift from CARE to the Vancouver Foundation weren't quite as big a gap as some people thought," he said, "because the characteristics of these institutions weren't that dissimilar."
McCort replaces outgoing Vancouver Foundation CEO Faye Wightman, who led the organization for eight years.
Wightman put her stamp on the foundation, broadening its role beyond a grantor of funds to a policy influencer, arguing that more work needs to be done to strengthen community bonds.
A provocative 2012 survey conducted by the foundation found that many Metro Vancouver residents struggle with loneliness and disengagement, and that the problem is worse in some ethnic communities. The findings are still making waves in local government and the media.
The City of Vancouver's Engaged City Task Force is a response to that work. The Vancouver Foundation has also partnered with the city on the Greenest City Fund and to launch the Streetohome Foundation.
This spring, the B.C. government provided $2 million to the Giving in Action Society, launched by the Vancouver Foundation in 2006 to support people with disabilities.
McCort said he was drawn to that potential.
"The foundation ... has great capacity to support development at the grassroots level, and it has resources with which to make a difference. It's in a position of influence when it comes to policy and public opinion. There are very few organizations in the country that have those three elements in their mandate and a track record to back it up."
While Wightman and McCort have both spent their entire working lives in philanthropy, Wightman has strong B.C. bonafides; McCort is new to the province. But he says there are more similarities between a large North American city like Vancouver and a city in the developing world, like Lusaka, Zambia, than you might think.
"We often dealt with people who were economically marginalized and lacked access to education and health-care services, similar to the type of work the Vancouver Foundation does," said McCort.
McCort grew up on a farm in southern Ontario; he met his wife in high school. He realized "there was a whole world out there" after a student exchange trip to Indonesia, and he enrolled in a new international development studies program at the University of Toronto.
That program, which included a work component, led to a first assignment in Mali.
"My enduring sense [is] that there are things people from very different backgrounds can accomplish together that you just wouldn't think," he said.
Like Wightman, who has emphasized public engagement as a way to find out what communities need, McCort has discovered that listening to the people you are trying to help is vital.
He learned that lesson in Zambia, where CARE partnered with the British government to build a water system to serve the 800,000 people who live in illegal settlements around the country's largest city, Lusaka.
CARE was redoing work that had already been done in the 1970s, when the World Bank had built a large urban water system, then left it to the city to run. But without enough capacity and funds to maintain the system, it fell into disuse within a decade of completion.
McCort's team went about it a different way, from the bottom up rather than the top down.
"It was a [$35 million] project," he explained. "We spent almost as much on social development and capacity building to manage water supplies as we did on building it. We spent a huge amount of time on the social infrastructure."
The project wrapped up in 2002.
When McCort visited in 2010, "the systems were running as well as the day we cut the ribbon and handed them over."
In fact, the infrastructure has expanded as the population has grown.
In another example, a project in Senegal misfired when the best intentions just didn't get results. The idea was to build a juice factory to make better use of mangos that were being wasted. That business failed when faced with transportation challenges and competition from established juice makers.
Once again, the answers lay with the community, which asked for better pest control and help selling their crop to the juice companies.
McCort calls this approach demand-led versus supply-led, and it's the method he plans to emphasize at the Vancouver Foundation.
He plans to spend time meeting with grant recipients – the non-profit organizations throughout B.C. who use Vancouver Foundation funds for an array of charitable endeavours, in amounts ranging from $50 to hold a block party to more than $200,000 to conduct a medical study on people with chronic health conditions.
His other priority, of course, will be raising money in a post-recession world where charitable giving is still flat and 80% of donations are raised from 20% of the population.
McCort wants to tackle that apathy.
"No one should feel they are separate from solutions," he said.
Vancouver Foundation snapshot
History
Started in 1943 with $1,000 from Vancouver secretary Alice MacKay. Current funds total $814 million. In 2012, the foundation granted a total of $46 million.
Currently focused on
Youth homelessness, with the foundation's Youth Vital Signs report about to come out this month.
Something for everyone
The foundation's other areas of interest are: animal welfare; arts and culture; children, youth and families; education; environment; medical research; health and social development; and employment support for people with disabilities.
