Francesca Gabaldon, above: “I don’t want anyone to feel lost and alone, like my mom when she came to Canada.”

RECYCLED: This article was originally published in October 2007

Dozens of women sit at hexagon-shaped tables eating from paper plates piled high with rice noodle salad, cornmeal tostadas, meatballs and bison cranberry stew. International potluck cuisine, I call it. One woman skillfully nabs a chocolate-dipped strawberry with her chopsticks while a young girl in a frilly pink dress happily eats with her fingers. Their meals are interrupted by some yelling at the front of the room.

“I want to apologize,” Lynn Berry shouts over the jackhammers ra-ta-ta-tating one floor below. “Normally they aren’t doing construction at night. I don’t know long this will go on.”

I think back to the conversation I had with Berry yesterday, when she gave me directions to this gathering at Bow Valley College in downtown Calgary. “There’s so much talking going on at these sessions,” she said, “sometimes I think I need to bring a blow horn because there’s so much energy.” And that was sans jackhammers.

Tonight’s potluck is a graduation of sorts for this year’s New Horizons Mentoring Program. Established in 2004 by the Youth in Motion education foundation, a charitable organization with offices in Calgary and Toronto, the six-month program pairs mentors with immigrant protégés. It’s designed not only to help immigrant women find jobs and settle into their new lives in Canada, but also to give mentors an intimate window into cultures around the world. Through monthly get-togethers such as this one, as well as phone calls, e-mails and one-on-one meetings, mentees get help in their search for meaningful work. But as mentors discover, immigrant women, no matter where they’re from, inevitably encounter hurdles.

Tonight’s jackhammer symphony is a small glitch compared to the onslaught of obstacles new immigrants confront every day: language barriers, cultural differences, housing problems – even shyness can be a major challenge. I learned a lot about these stumbling blocks while living and working in Afghanistan for most of 2004. Based in Kabul as a stringer with the Toronto Star, I started and ran a monthly political newspaper for a Canadian non-governmental organization. Rah-e-Naw (translation: enlightenment) was written and produced mostly by women.

Although the dozen women I worked with were aspiring journalists, many were timid and shy. They lacked self-confidence. That was understandable: their spirits had been beaten down for years by Taliban men who believe that women are weak and feeble and should be cloaked in burkas. Even today, many women in Kabul (which is far more liberal than rural Afghanistan) don’t go out at night because, as the newspaper staff told me and believed, no respectable woman is seen in public after dark.

One 17 year old, Ellaha, was painfully shy at first, rarely making eye contact. She always wore bulky, dark clothing. But after several weeks as the newspaper’s graphic artist and editorial cartoonist, she transformed into a determined woman who cracked jokes, wore colourful clothes and made regular trips to the male-dominated printing house.

Gawhar, a journalism student at Kabul University, blushed and giggled – a lot – when we met. But after a few months of hard, dedicated work, she began to shine as the newspaper’s star, crafting impressive investigative articles. She single-handedly broke a story about election corruption after ferreting out Afghans who had several voting cards, which they discreetly sold to political parties, who in turn stuffed ballot boxes. The story was a coup for Gawhar because it beat all international journalists in Kabul and received a mention in the New York Times. Our newspaper, published in three languages, focused mainly on Afghanistan’s first-ever democratic elections. After a few months, many of the women proudly evolved into assertive journalists, interviewing male wannabe politicians – a bold move because women, in typical Islamic tradition, aren’t accustomed to questioning men.

Three years later, I’m thinking of Gawhar and Ellaha as I look around the room at Bow Valley College. I’m wondering about the mentors, about what they feel while coaching and guiding their charges. After my experiences starting a newspaper, I know this type of teaching can be frustrating, but if you persist and remind yourself frequently of the goal at hand – helping women get careers – the personal rewards run deep.

Mostly young but established professionals, the mentors tell me that, indeed, they “get” as much from their mentees as they give. They learn about their mentees’ foreign (and sometimes quirky) cultures and customs. They are humbled by the strength and courage of their mentees. They are emboldened; one mentor summoned the nerve to start going on blind dates after hearing how her mentee arrived pregnant from the Philippines. They translate everyday expressions such as “What’s up?” and explain what “camping” is to women who are baffled by the familiar tent-and-trailer icon on highway signs. They talk about Canadian office attire; one mentor spent a full hour discussing socks with her mentee. Some mentors are from immigrant families themselves; they empathize with their mentees’ daily struggles. Some simply cherish the opportunity to help other women.

“I really love working with women,” says mentor Lynne Perry-Reid. “I feel like there’s an automatic connection, no matter what culture you’re from, when you’re working with other women. It’s always a very caring, nurturing environment. It’s not competitive; everyone is working together.”

That’s so true. When women gather for a common purpose, a natural, instinctive bond often forms. Men do it too, usually while playing sports – it’s called male bonding. From my experiences, women tend to connect and relate differently. We have “hen parties” full of cackling and uncontrollable laughter. We nurture, support and inspire each another. We touch each other softly on the arm. We hug.

When the jackhammers stop rattling, Berry, New Horizons’ project manager in Calgary, looks up from the floor, from the source of the noise down below. “As always,” she says, “we begin with our bragging session. Anybody like to speak first? Remember we are all friends here.” Mentees may be uncomfortable speaking to a crowd, but getting out of their comfort zone is part of the program here.

Larisa Kulikova, a Russian who arrived in Calgary last year, stands up. “Most of us know that I work for a bank,” she begins with a thick accent. “The first week for me was a shock. I didn’t understand people. I had to read a lot of information online. It was so overwhelming, I asked the branch manager to switch to a teller position. I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to be fired.’ But I have a wonderful branch manager. She let me switch. Now I have more breath. I ask for help.”

After so many months in Afghanistan, I know too well about women being afraid to ask. In Canada – everywhere in the western world, for that matter – we’re raised and encouraged to question things. But in many countries, women are taught not to probe, especially one’s superior. It’s considered rude, disrespectful.

Before Kulikova sits down, the women break into applause. “That’s a very good message,” Berry says. “It’s always better to ask.”

Later, Berry tells me that running New Horizons feels like “herding cats” sometimes. Still, the program boasts a 95% success rate, with almost every mentee landing a job – many en route to their chosen career. At the beginning of each intake, Berry meets with mentors as a group. She tells them that while the program is “career focused,” mentors are urged to help mentees “figure it out” when they stumble in any way. Not to do the work for them, but to show them where to go.

“I’ve learned over the years that you can’t really separate life skills or personal issues from employability issues,” says Berry. “And mentees, and quite often mentors, have a lot to learn, and a lot to give.”

“Homeless Copywriter seeks hot meal.”

When Geoff Vreeken first wrote those words in the subject line of an email, it was not a plea for a steaming bowl of soup, it was an effort to impress potential employers with his wit. The recession had just hit and Vreeken had been fired. Around 20 percent of the staff were saved, the rest were tossed to sea, joining thousands of other out of work creative professionals scrambling for dry land.

He could have felt sorry for himself. He could have given up and switched careers. But instead, Vreeken found a way to make himself so sought after that he was turning down jobs, by helping the homeless.

It’s a surprisingly common story. In creative industries, recessionsforce professionals to innovate. Beside the benefit of giving their time and talent to a good cause, creative types doing pro bono work for charitable organizations get more creative freedom than many paid jobs would allow.

Vreeken hadn’t paid much attention to the recession until assignments slowly stopped coming across his desk. Before he knew what was happening, he didn’t even have a desk to sit at.

“It’s kind of like getting dumped,” says Vreeken. And if the recession were a failed relationship, Vreeken rebounded hard, throwing himself at every job he could imagine in his field. After several months and dozens of resumes, he had still heard nothing. His savings were gone, unpaid student loan payments started piling up and bills were starting to come in the mail with “Please return immediately” printed on the top. No one was hiring.

If he was going to get noticed, Vreeken realized, he would have to do something extraordinary. He decided to create a fake ad campaign, advertising himself posing on the street as a homeless copywriter. Showcasing his creativity, and his willingness to push the envelope, it just might impress cash-strapped employers enough to bring him on board.

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Vreeken was no stranger to homelessness. His apartment near Vancouver’s famously grim Downtown Eastside sat next to Covenant House Vancouver, an organization that provides shelter and assistance to homeless youth. Late one night, he was sitting in bed lamenting his growing line of credit and brainstorming for his campaign when it hit him, just outside his door the homeless population had grown by almost 400 per cent in just six years. Homeless kids don’t have ad agencies. Instead of revamping his portfolio by making a fake ad campaign, why not make a real one for someone who really needed it?

Deena Tokaryk, a marketing and communications specialist, had the same experience when she was laid off in a round of funding cuts from the BC Treaty Commission. When she was approached by the leading project manager of Home for the Games, an Olympic home rental service whose profits are donated to organizations helping homelessness, she saw an opportunity to donate her time to a cause she believed in.

“As much as I’m getting input and suggestions from other people, I’m leading all of this, and I’m making the decisions,” says Tokaryk. “There are no limits, except my time and energy.” This situation has given her more confidence and more responsibility than she’s ever had in a paid position.

Heidi Ehlers, founder of Black Bag, one of the country’s top recruiting agencies for creative talent, says that pro bono work for charities is a common outlet for creatives wanting to keep their skills taut and up their profile.

“One of the most difficult things a creative person goes through when they’re not working is that feeling of getting stagnant. I think in order for a creative person to feel really fulfilled, they need to be creating,” Ehlers said.

This looks like it could be bible camp. Young people, mostly in their late teens, are making the cheerful, tinkling sounds of breakfast. Even the groggy kids are smiling, talking about the hows and whys of their grogginess.

In a room beside the dining area, the sun shines through a stained glass Jesus and someone plays a piano in the way people at parties absentmindedly strum guitars – half to stumble on a potential hook, half to get attention. The event, what with all the bright religious paraphernalia on the walls, sounds like a hymn written by Rufus Wainwright. Maybe. Only this isn’t Bible Camp. It’s Gay Camp. At least, that’s what one of the founders calls it.

Photograph by Curtis Comeau

Kristopher Wells stands in the middle of the morning hubbub. Breakfast is over for the most part, and the campers are starting to look busy, entering the lobby, exiting, returning, grouping up. Wells talks to the campers who come up to him, like the big, copper-haired kid in a neon blue Obama shirt. But mostly, Wells, who is well built, head shaved, and wears the eternally unfashionable uniform of a camp counselor – khaki shorts, socks rising out of outdoorsy shoes – is playing host to a group of media. He selects a few articulate, camera-friendly kids to tell their stories to a local news reporter. After he ushers the interviewer and interviewee outside to talk in the morning sun and then sits off to the side watching the younger generation spread the good news of Camp Fyrefly. He looks proud. This, just as much as what will go on at the camp itself, is what the camp is about.

Wells started Camp Fyrefly as a place for Canada’s “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-identified, two-spirited, intersexed, queer, questioning, and allied youth,” (or LGBTTQ&A) in 2004. That broad definition is how Fyrefly is described on the website, and it’s a big tent. (The “y” in Fyrefly is not a typo – it stands for youth.) Embedded in that misspelled jumble is the goal to foster leadership in teens. The camp doesn’t exactly have sessions on how to give, say, Obama-style, hope-infused speeches or to create the next generation of LGBT CEOs; the leadership training is more internalized. Which makes sense, considering that a lot of the problems LGBT youth face are internalized, too.

Before he started Camp Fyrefly, Wells was a teacher in St. Albert, a suburb of Edmonton. After a student from the school killed himself, Wells felt responsible. “That was a significant turning point in my own life,” he says. “We had never been able to talk about our identities in the school environment. I saw how the school dealt with it, with complete denial and silence, and decided that I couldn’t be in that kind of environment as a gay teacher who had to be closeted to work.”

He left teaching and joined a youth group called Youth Understanding Youth, which became Camp Fyrefly. Now Wells runs workshops in four provinces and has worked with more than 150 teens (the average age of attendees is 18, who can attend for a subsidized cost of $25). This is possible because the camp is more about community than bricks and mortar. It can go anywhere, even to this church in St. Albert.

As kids mill around, the local media are talking with one such kid who just ran for city council in Surrey, B.C. He is confident and eloquent, a born leader. “Our unofficial motto is ‘take what you need and give to others,’” Wells explains. “Someone has created the opportunity for you to be here, and it is investing in you as a leader. How are you going to repay that investment? We let the young people define the kind of leadership role they are going to take, and recognize for many of them, they need to spend the time being leaders to themselves first.”

After the campers have their time on camera, Wells is up. He speaks effortlessly and manages to make his sound bite material sound sincere. He’s like the cool teacher who had that remarkable, yet elusive ability to connect with students. Watching him, you can see just where the campers who had their moment on camera might be in a few years. U

Michele Fugiel Gartner, self-described “philanthropy junkie,” didn’t truly understand that there was a world outside of her hometown until the Russian letters started to arrive. She was in the eighth grade, in Chicago, and had written to a school magazine looking for a pen pal. Her query was translated and published in a similar publication in Russia. The responses filled her mailbox – she received more than 300 letters – and opened her up to hundreds of different lives, most similar to her own. “That was a big marker for me,” Gartner says. The letters showed her that “there is something else out there.” The experience sparked an interest in intercultural dialogue that has led her around the world and, now, to Calgary.

Philanthropy junkie Michele Fugiel Gartner of Social Venture Partners Calgary. Photo by Marc Rimmer

Gartner and I meet over coffee not far from her digs at Social Venture Partners Calgary (SVP), where she is executive director. A private philanthropy firm that matches individual donors with local non-profits, it is a member of the global association SVP International. Beyond telling me the story of her post-Soviet pen pals, it’s difficult to get Gartner to talk about herself. Her impulse is to talk, instead, about the “sector,” about policies, about the “we” of her colleagues at SVP. In anyone else, this tendency to stay on message would suggest stiffness or even evasion. But she laughs so easily and so often, I realize talking policy is what brings Gartner joy. She is not merely promoting the non-profit sector, she is revealing what fills her heart.

Gartner studied communications at Arizona State University and, after graduation, taught English for two years in Japan. She returned to academia with a focus on Asia and made her way to the East-West Center in Hawaii, then to the School of Orient and African Studies at the University of London, where she studied public diplomacy. Eventually, Gartner joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle. This was her first foray into the world of large-scale, multifaceted private philanthropy.

At the Gates Foundation, Gartner quickly learned that philanthropy was about more than just a Robin Hood transfer of dollars from the rich to the poor. She learned the difference between giving and “giving well.” She learned the due diligence of grants and grant writing. The government side of philanthropy. The political side. The grassroots side. She learned about tax and legal implications and the policy intricacies of policy that would bore most people into numbness. Philanthropy is “really layered,” she says. “That’s why I am so captivated.”

After rounding her way from Chicago to Arizona, Japan to Hawaii, and London to Seattle, Gartner arrived in Calgary last year with her husband, Craig, a Canadian-born banker she met in London. While she navigates the world of local philanthropy – SVP has invested more than $1.5 million in local “investees,” as they call the organizations they fund – Craig is educating her in the finer points of Canadian culture. Her father-in-law, meanwhile, gives her books about hockey. (Gartner has already joined the Flames faithful, itself an act of charity.) But it is a northern brand of philanthropy that most intrigues her. In the United States, the struggle is to get government to support non-profits. In Canada, the government is by far the biggest investor in the sector. The challenge for Canadian non-profits, then, is to attract private donors, those people and businesses that can make an impassioned and personal commitment to a cause – not to mention bringing in serious dollars. NEXT PAGE

The Green Hill is an 86-year-old hotel in the Crowsnest Pass. It has a spiral fire escape and rickety pillars supporting a balcony under its barn-shaped roof. The exterior paint is peeling and, inside, the walls of the upstairs hallway are lined with red shag carpet. Though the rooms are still advertised, they haven’t slept a guest in years. But the tavern on the main floor opens at 11 a.m. It’s one of those institution beer halls with dark wood paneling, a line of VLTs and a lingering scent of spilled drinks and cigarettes. You go for the company, not the ambiance. The vinyl chairs are comfortable, the beer is cheap and the jukebox plays everything from Slayer to Johnny Cash. The bartenders don’t care how many tables you push together for your party. It’s the place to kick off a weekend in the Pass.

A sign tacked to one of the wood pillars announces that this year’s “Thunder in the Valley” shot glasses are now on sale. That’s one of reasons why I’m in the Pass: to talk to Richard “Rocket” Crane, whose fireballs are one of the highlights of the pyrotechnics show that has filled the sky here every July since 1994.

We’re not talking about fireworks tonight, though. The show is the glitzy side of Rocket and his friends’ arduous pastime. Two weeks ago, they were in front of this lounge hosing down puddles of hepatitis C-positive blood.

Rocket’s head is shaved to the scalp, but for a single, conspicuous tuft of downy blonde fuzz. On top of his round face the hairdo makes him look like a grown-up Cabbage Patch Kid. He’s a miner, like many in this valley. But he devotes his free time to a greater sense of duty. Tilting back his beer, he says of the blood incident, “Just another day in the life of the Blairmore Volunteer Fire Department.”                  

Darren Aschacher gave Rocket his nickname years ago, a play on the name of hockey legend Maurice “Rocket” Richard. Rocket’s house in Blairmore, not far from the Green Hill, is known as the Launch Pad.

Aschacher left the Pass for college in Edmonton. He goes back often to see his mom but his home is the city now. He met his partner, Heidi Edgar, in Edmonton; she was supposed to come with us but cancelled at the last minute. “Darren needs to blow off some steam,” she explained, four months pregnant, one hand on her belly, as we left their house to start the five-hour drive to the Pass. He would later interpret her words as permission to “go on a ripper.”

Aschacher wasn’t only celebrating a reunion with friends. He’d just had a job interview with the City of Edmonton fire department. Unlike Rocket’s volunteer gig in the Pass, which began by filling out an application, the process for getting a paid, professional position involves a grueling prerequisite of courses, countless volunteer hours, physical training and an eight-to-one chance of rejection. There’s no smoking, no drugs, no history with the cops allowed. But his motivation is the same as his friends in the Pass: integrity, community service, adrenaline.

This is Aschacher’s second attempt at a spot on the FD. If he doesn’t make it this time, doing it all over will be tough with a baby on the way.

The drive to Crowsnest Pass takes us southwest from Calgary, within 10 minutes of the B.C. border and an hour of the U.S. The Pass is one of three corridors through the Canadian Rockies. This auspicious positioning has favoured settlement here for 10,000 years. Nomadic First Nations used this valley on their seasonal rounds. The Crowsnest Railway spurred coal mining in the late 1890s. During prohibition, the Pass became a strategic spot for bootlegging. Today it draws tourists from Alberta and the U.S. heading to alpine resorts in B.C.

The Pass is made up of five touching communities: Coleman, Blairmore, Frank, Bellevue and Hillcrest – mining towns that amalgamated in 1979. Though officially one municipality with a population of 6,000, people here still say, “I’m from Coleman,” “I’m from Frank.” I envy that. The sense that people are really from where they say they’re from. Sure, I’m from Edmonton. But I don’t know the names of most people in town, or even my neighbours. My roots don’t go back for a century. I don’t run into extended family crossing the street. Not like people from the Pass.

Aschacher can trace his line back to the Italian immigrants lured here by coal mining at the turn of the last century. Not related, but certainly the most famous, was Emilio “Emperor Pic” Picariello, a rumrunner who, together with the young wife of a business associate, killed a Mountie in a Bonnie and Clyde-style shootout. Florence Losandro remains the first and only Alberta woman to receive the death penalty.    

Everyone bitches about paying taxes. That will never change. But you soon may be able to witness your hard-earned dollars at work. Jay Baydala, the CEO of Christmas Futures, a Calgary non-profit, calls the concept “proof of impact feedback.” He believes social networking sites can create virtual communities which monitor, police and post progress reports on development projects.

Far fetched? Maybe. But Baydala thinks the idea has traction, and he’s developing open-source software to make it happen. The system, known as Donor Trust, is being applied to non-profit businesses to help them see whether the donations being funnelled to development projects are being put to good use. Once complete, Donor Trust will link to websites such as Flickr and YouTube and people working near a development project will be able to post project updates online.

“We’re not reinventing the wheel,” Baydala says. The plan is that with a click of the mouse, you’ll be able to pull up a building plan for a well. Or glance at a video that chronicles its construction. And, once there’s enough technology at a development site, you can chat with a local. “You can ask Juan, ‘Hey, is this project helping you?’” says Baydala. “And he can say, ‘No, it’s crap.’”

It will be at least a year before Donor Trust is fully functional and even longer before it’s ready to tackle the taxman. But Baydala believes the idea could one day help democratize the tax process, the same way he hopes to monitor development projects. “You could see what milestones are reached or missed,” he says. “You could see pictures. You could see everything.”