Good afternoon. I'm delighted to be here today to lend my voice and enthusiastic support to the launch of The Maytree Foundation's abcGTA project.
The Maytree Foundation has this remarkable gift for getting out in front of issues. The Foundation is a trail-blazing organization known for its leadership, its advocacy, and its practical solutions to pressing social problems. They do more than study issues -- they come up with ways of addressing them, head-on. And they've done it again with this new project being launched today.
The face of Toronto, and Ontario, has changed. Toronto is a city where 100 languages are spoken every day, a city that it owes its success to the generations of immigrants who chose Toronto as their place to live, work and raise their families.
When my parents, Holocaust survivors, arrived here in 1949, they spoke no English, they had no job prospects, and they had no networks to help them get started. There was little in the way of settlement services back then.
The newcomers to our city today are a very different and an even more diverse lot. There are more visible minorities from different parts of the world, and many of our newcomers are professionals with advanced degrees and impressive work experience who are ready to hit the ground running when they get here. And for those who need more help, we have more help to offer, in the form of education, training and social supports that open up opportunities for them down the line.
A recent StatsCan report predicts that by 2017, about one-half of the population in Toronto will belong to a visible minority. Will that 50 percent of our population be fully engaged in our community and represented on the boards of our institutions? Not if we keep going at the current rate.
Despite powerful and passionate arguments for greater boardroom diversity, it's discouraging that so little has changed. This is particularly true of corporate boards, and it's still often the case with boards in the public and voluntary sectors.
Bluma Appel, one of our board members at the Ontario Trillium Foundation and a name well known to many of you, tells the story of how she started a personal crusade in the 80's to get a woman onto the board of each of the big five banks. She paid visits to bank CEOs and Chairs, she wrote letters and lobbied and used all of her powers of persuasion to make the case to get women on those boards. She was persistent and eventually successful. Women are represented on bank boards today, not to the extent they should be, but at least they're at the table.
Over the years, we have seen public and charitable boards outshine the corporate sector in bringing women, Francophones, and other under-represented groups into the boardrooms where decisions are made and policies are set. What will it take to get more visible minorities represented on those same boards? It will take a strong and determined champion ' as Bluma was for women, as the Maytree Foundation is for visible minorities and immigrants.
At the Ontario Trillium Foundation, we have 25 very accomplished, seasoned board members who represent the regional and sectoral diversity of the province. There is good gender balance, there is Francophone and aboriginal representation, and there is a reasonable mix of urban-rural members on our board. The same is generally true of our the 16 Grant Review Teams around the province who do the 'heavy lifting' in terms of reviewing grant proposals in their local catchments. We are not as culturally representative as we would like to be, but we are working on it.
Not long after I was appointed Chair of the Ontario Trillium Foundation board in December 2004, I expressed a desire to see our board and our Grant Review Teams be more representative in another way. I wanted to see more of the next generation included in the mix ' smart and talented people in their twenties and thirties who are the leaders and decision makers of tomorrow.
The average age on our board, on most boards in fact, is 50 or perhaps even older. Yet when I look at the projects we fund, and at the people who are running and leading those projects, I see so many remarkable young people of varied ethno-cultural backgrounds. As a board, we learn so much from them. And as a board, we would benefit so much from having them as part of our grant-making decisions.
The Ontario Trillium Foundation is Canada's leading grant-making foundation, distributing $100 million annually in funds to charitable and not-for-profit organizations around the province. On average, we provide approximately 1,500 grants each year to community organizations. Many of these organizations promote diversity and prepare members of multi-cultural and visible minority groups for corporate and community leadership.
Some examples: