Susan Ritchie at her home in Vancouver on December 17th, 2010. Ritchie is a translator who was involved in early diplomatic contacts between Canada and North Korea; an experience that influenced her to set up her own NGO in the country.
Simon Hayter for The Globe and Mail
Canadians Changing the World
The connectors
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Last updated
It might be the quintessentially Canadian act: bringing people together. These trailblazers all make links where none existed before. In doing so, they are helping to build wealth, heal old wounds and save young lives
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Marc Foggin: Digging out
Marc Foggin, head of Plateau Perspectives
When a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck the Tibetan plateau last April, bringing many of the buildings in remote Yushu County crumbling down, the calls for help went out to the usual sources: the monks in the town's main lamasery, the massive apparatus that is the Chinese government – and a tiny Canadian-Scottish charity.
The town was devastated, with almost 3,000 dead. Outside help was needed, but the government was nervous about foreigners running around the politically sensitive Tibetan plateau. Among the few outsiders known and trusted by local residents and authorities in Qinghai province was Montrealer Marc Foggin, 40, founder of Plateau Perspectives, a non-government organization that had been working in Yushu for more than a decade. The only problem was that Plateau Perspectives, headed by Mr. Foggin and his wife, Marion Torrance-Foggin, was a four-person organization focused on conservation.
But the couple were eager to help. Within 24 hours, Dr. Torrance-Foggin – an MD trained in her native Scotland – was making the arduous 12-hour overland journey to Yushu from the provincial capital of Xining with a team of medical staff and a carload of supplies. Within days, Plateau Perspectives was running five medical teams in Yushu, treating as many as 250 patients a day.
To ethnic Chinese and Tibetans alike, the 40-year-old Mr. Foggin is an old friend. His father, Peter, was born in China, the child of Christian missionaries. Mr. Foggin himself has been working in and around Qinghai since the early 1990s, when he first arrived to study the Tibetan grasslands and its native species. He acknowledges that his organization must walk a careful line. “The [Tibetan] community welcomes us because we give them an ear. We don't pretend to know what their needs are. And I think the main reason that the government welcomes us is that we agreed to report to them the work we're up to, what we're doing and who our foreign personnel are. So there's a free flow of information. Foreign NGOs who don't communicate with the government create a lot of nervousness.”
That hard-earned trust means Plateau Perspectives will remain in Yushu this year, helping to rebuild the medical system as the main town of Gyegu (pre-quake population: 100,000) undergoes a makeover. Part of the recovery also involves bolstering the local tourism industry, which will allow Mr. Foggin to push his other favourite cause – the preservation of the region's endangered wild donkeys and snow leopards.
– Mark MacKinnon
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Susan Ritchie, 47
Humanitarian aid worker
What Kim can't do: Even as nuclear tensions push North Korea into the spotlight, Vancouver-based Susan Ritchie works quietly behind the scenes to do something the secretive land of Kim Jong-il can't manage all alone: feed its starving children.
Hungry mouths: The idea for First Steps, the agency she now serves as executive director, was born in 2000 when Ms. Ritchie, who'd grown up in South Korea (her parents were missionaries) and returned to study for four years, was the translator for a Canadian delegation visiting the North as a prelude to establishing diplomatic relations. While there, she met women unable to feed their children and couldn't get them out of her head. Back in Vancouver, she stumbled on Malnutrition Matters, an Ottawa non-profit that makes VitaGoat and VitaCow, machines that turn plant matter (primarily soy) into milk. Founded in 2001, First Steps now provides milk to an estimated 80,000 children. It also distributes Sprinkles, a packaged supplement that fills critical nutrient gaps for pennies a day. “The cognitive development [in children] from six months to 24 months is utterly dependent on those micronutrients. They cost nothing and if they don't get them their future looks entirely different.”
Her 2011 moment: First Steps will undertake a massive expansion of its Sprinkles program from just three to all nine of North Korea's provinces and still, Ms. Ritchie says, “ keep our Cows and Goats producing soy milk at the current level.”
– Wendy Stueck
Susan Ritchie at her home in Vancouver on December 17th, 2010. Ritchie is a translator who was involved in early diplomatic contacts between Canada and North Korea; an experience that influenced her to set up her own NGO in the country.— Simon Hayter for The Globe and Mail
The cognitive development [in children] from six months to 24 months is utterly dependent on those micronutrients. They cost nothing and if they don't get them their future looks entirely different — Susan Ritchie
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Kimberly Prost, 52
United Nations ombudsman
A ray of hope: Ms. Prost was appointed in July to review for the first time complaints filed by hundreds of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members who have been blacklisted by the UN Security Council. Those on the so-called 1267 list, including at least one Canadian, have had their assets seized and been denied the right to travel.
Justice league: Called “the most qualified person in the world for the job” by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the gold-medal graduate (1982) of the University of Manitoba Law School spent two decades with the federal Department of Justice (in 1995 she wrote the letter asking the Swiss to investigate ties between Brian Mulroney and German businessman Karlheinz Schreiber). She also served as a judge on the war-crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia and has a long track record of cases involving terrorism, national security and human rights.
Her 2011 moment: She expects to deal with a half-dozen cases this year and has promised to issue blunt and revealing reports about how the UN Security Council has treated people. If she does, she will no doubt test the strength of the council's newly professed interest in fairness and transparency – and shed some light on the murky and draconian way the big powers treat those they suspect.
– Paul Koring
Kimberly Prost, serving with The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a Ad Litem Judge
For more information on Kimberly Prost:
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Frederick Mulder, 67
Philanthropist, art dealer
Getting to give: “Too much of everything is just enough”; “He who dies with the most toys wins” – these are maxims to live by for some of the world's affluent. Not former Saskatchewanian Frederick Mulder who, as a U.K. resident since 1968, has earned an enviable living as a big-dollar art dealer, which in turn underpins his enviable reputation as a philanthropist. In 2007, for instance, Mr. Mulder sold a Picasso etching for just over $3-million (U.S.), a record, then gave about $2.3-million of this to the Prairie Trust, a charity dedicated to sustainable agriculture that he'd founded four years earlier. Mr. Mulder's main agency for doing good is The Funding Network, the pioneering “public giving circle” he launched in London in 2002 that now has “chapters” in several other U.K. cities as well as Johannesburg and Toronto. “I've discovered that giving with others is more interesting, more effective.”
Gold-plated: Mr. Mulder, who is still a Canadian citizen, travelled to England in the late 1960s to study for a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford. In the early 1970s he was hired as a dealer by the venerable London art firm Colnaghi. Establishing his own art business in 1975, Mr. Mulder numbers private collectors and institutions such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery in Washington among his clients. In 2005, he was awarded the Judges' Special Prize by the Beacon Fellowship Charitable Trust for “leveraging millions of pounds ... to encourage others to be philanthropic.”
His 2011 moment: Art-wise, Mr. Mulder plans to sell a trove of original Picasso linocuts from the collection of Picasso's linocut printer, Hildago Arnera. In the meantime, The Funding Network plans to focus resources on climate-change initiatives including the 10:10 Campaign to reduce carbon emissions and the Prince of Wales's P8 Group, a collection of the world's leading public pension funds dedicated to “kick-starting the move to a low-carbon economy.”
– James Adams
Frederick Mulder, print dealer and philanthropist, centre Credit: The Beacon Fellowship Charitable Trust
I've discovered that giving with others is more interesting, more effective — Frederick Mulder
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Nadir Patel, 40
Consul-general of Canada to Shanghai
Sky high: As Canada's chief air negotiator, Mr. Patel oversaw the signing of 43 bilateral air-transport agreements, including a pact with all 27 members of the European Union in 2006. The landmark deal, which allowed European carriers to fly into Canada and Canadian Airlines to fly to the EU, was drafted amid intense bargaining all while he was completing his master's of business administration.
The political is personal: Born in Britain and raised in Cambridge, Ont., he began his career at Revenue Canada before joining the Privy Council Office in 2003. There he was the only Muslim on the team that developed Canada's first national security policy. He also launched the inquiry into the bombing of Air India Flight 182, collaborating with families who lost loved ones in the tragedy (including his own).
His 2011 moment: Mr. Patel wants to bring smaller Canadian businesses to both Shanghai and China's booming second-tier cities. Canadian exports to China rose about 20 per cent last year, and if they rise even more this year, he will have done his job.
– Andy Hoffman
Nadir Patel, consul general of Canada in Shanghai. Credit: Expo 2010 Shanghai China
Mr. Patel wants to bring smaller Canadian businesses to both Shanghai and China's booming second-tier cities
