Top 40 over 40: Social activists 2008

Arctic guardian

When Sheila Watt-Cloutier looks out the windows of her home in Iqaluit, Nunavut, she sees beauty in the tundra and hills stretching out to Frobisher Bay, and in the sky above Tundra Valley. “I have a partnership with this view,” says the 53-year-old environmental activist and grandmother. “I protect it and it protects me. This place rejuvenates me back to health.”

Watt-Cloutier has won world recognition for her efforts to fight climate change and environmental degradation in the North: She was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, celebrated here at home with the Order of Canada in 2006, and recognized by the United Nations with a human development award in 2007. “The awards and recognition are wonderful, but it’s not about me getting awards, it’s about the world getting the message.”

For over a decade, first in her role as head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and now as a private citizen, Watt-Cloutier has been spreading the message that climate change and pollution are not just environmental issues, they are human rights issues. Along with 62 other Inuit, she launched a groundbreaking petition in 2005, which was presented last March to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, accusing the United States of violating Inuit human rights with its failure to limit greenhouse gas emissions. And while a petition to a UN body may seem like a small act, in fact it was a carefully researched and strategized legal effort that captured the attention of lawmakers, academics and the press around the world, putting a human face on global warming.

Since the petition’s launch, she has spoken to groups around the globe about the impact of climate change on the North. “We have a 10- to 15-year window of opportunity to make a change,” says Watt-Cloutier. “The Arctic is the health barometer for the world, and just understanding that we are all connected is a huge motivator in getting people to change the things they do at home, what they drive, who they vote for. I’ve come to see that the citizens of the United States and Canada are far ahead of their governments in their willingness to make those changes.”

Watt-Cloutier came to her activism later in life. She was a recently divorced mother of two in her late thirties when she asked herself how she could give something back to the Inuit culture that had nurtured her. “I wanted to make a difference for those who come after me,” she says. And while she’s had many successes, she’s also faced personal challenges: In the last decade, Watt-Cloutier has lost five close family members, including her mother, aunt and older sister. “I thought I would never stop grieving,” she says. “I wept in foreign countries, in strange hotels, in airports.”

But she also drew strength from her grief, honouring her lost family members by fighting to protect their culture. “My people have survived and thrived in the Arctic. We know a little bit about sustainability and we can offer that wisdom to the world.” If the world listens, she says, then maybe her 10-year-old grandson Lee and his generation will find strength in the northern landscape she’s worked so hard to protect.
Update (January 2009): In 2008, Watt-Cloutier received honourary doctorates from 7 Canadian universities.

Tennis prize

Venus Williams and Justine Henin must love Stacey Allaster: As the president of the Sony Ericsson WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) Tour, Allaster, 44, was instrumental in boosting the women’s prizes to equal the men’s for the first time at 2007’s Wimbledon and French Open. The Welland, Ont., native spent 15 years with Tennis Canada and was a moving force behind the success of the Rogers Cup women’s and men’s tournaments in Montreal and Toronto before making the move to the WTA in 2006.

Prairie fundraiser

Saskatoon radio personality Lisa Rendall never thought she’d be a million dollar woman, but in the seven years since being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, that’s what she’s helped raise through her annual Lisa Rendall Golf Classic (www.lisarendall.com) and the C95 Radio Marathon for breast cancer research. The 43-year-old’s cancer — which had spread to her spine, liver and ribs — has stabilized, thanks in part to treatment with Herceptin. Still, she considers her 40-pound weight loss her biggest accomplishment of 2007. “I wanted to do my part to keep my vertebrae stable and out of danger of collapsing,” she says. “It was something I could do to increase my odds of survival.”
Update (January 2009): Rendall was a speaker at the 5th World Conference on Breast Cancer in Winnipeg held in June, 2008.

United leader

Some cash in after a career in politics, opting for lucrative lobbying roles. Toronto’s Frances Lankin, 53, chose a different route: After 11 years as an MPP, she opted to chase cash for social causes by heading up the city’s United Way. President and CEO since 2001, she’s achieved record-breaking fundraising goals: In 2006, United Way Toronto raised $106.8 million, making the city second only to Seattle in North American donor generosity.

Heartfelt friends

Look for heart-health experts, and it won’t take long for the names of Heart and Stroke Foundation researchers and health promoters Beth Abramson, 41, and Heather Ross, 45, to pop up. The Toronto docs — and pals — are among the country’s finest, with Abramson in the top spot as director of the cardiac prevention and rehab centre and women’s cardiovascular health at St. Michael’s Hospital and Ross in the lead role as director of cardiac prevention and deputy director of the Multi Organ Transplant Program at University Health Network. There’s still time for play, though: In her spare time, Ross is the lead singer with her R&B band “The Marginal Donors.”

Good doer

It’s impossible to say how many lives Kay Blair, 53, has helped improve. The Toronto community leader is the moving force behind the Community MicroSkills Development Centre, a hub of settlement, training and employment services for women, immigrants, visible minorities and youth. Among her accomplishments: spearheading the first self-employment program in Canada to help low-income women start their own businesses, and starting the pioneering Women’s Technology Institute to provide information technology training to low-income women.

Africa’s advocate

Ilana Landsberg-Lewis knows the power of her family name, even if her father, Stephen Lewis, sometimes doesn’t. It was 2003 and the elder Lewis was completing his work as the UN’s special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa. It was a job that, in his own words, had left him “emotionally unhinged,” frustrated by the world’s inaction, heartbroken by the human cost of the pandemic. He and his daughter, a labour and human rights lawyer who had also worked at the UN, talked about starting a foundation that would get money into the hands of the people best situated to have an impact: grassroots African-run agencies working directly with those infected and affected by AIDS. Landsberg-Lewis agreed to run the organization from her kitchen table in Toronto.

What would it be called? “He wanted to call it the Grassroots Action Foundation,” she says, blue eyes twinkling. “I told him there was no way I was going to spend my days on the phone telling people I was calling from GAF.” It wasn’t just that the acronym literally sounded like a synonym for “mistake.” Landsberg-Lewis, 42, knew that while her father wanted the spotlight on the issue rather than himself, it was his passion and powerful presence that would inspire Canadians to act, and his reputation and network in Africa that would enable them to get the funds to where they were most needed. So it had to be called the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

Four years later, the foundation that started in Landsberg-Lewis’s kitchen is housed on the fifth floor of a converted industrial building in downtown Toronto, and the offices buzz with volunteers and staff who coordinate more than $20 million in funding, assisting more than 100 grassroots programs in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s predominantly from individual donations across Canada, including newlyweds who asked guests to make donations in lieu of gifts, children who’ve held fundraising birthday parties, students who organized bake sales, and a burgeoning number of “grandmother” groups raising funds for African grandmothers who have become caregivers to AIDS orphans. “We never anticipated this level of response,” says Landsberg-Lewis. “While governments have been so slow and even negligent in their response, individual Canadians get it.”

And the woman who grew up following her father (and her newspaper columnist mother, Michele Landsberg) to political rallies and marches now brings her own sons, Zev, five, and Yoav, three, to events like the Grandmothers to Grandmothers inaugural meeting preceding the World AIDS Conference. “People talk about a life balance between work and life, but in our family, our work is our life, and life is about the small contributions we can make to improve the lives of others.”

Want to meet even more amazing women? Check out the rest of the Top 40 over 40!

2007:
Barrier breakers
Attention getters
Artistic achievers

2008:
Leading ladies
Women in business
Social activists
Trail blazers

2009:
Sweet success
Amazing advocates
Super stars

This article originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of More