Profile: Denise took her first Genuine Contact course in 2005 and will have completed the Foundational Workshops by August 2010. She has also taken the Advanced Medicine Wheel course and uses this tool extensively. With a PhD in public policy, Denise has both theoretical and practical knowledge of a variety of tools, frameworks and strategies that are effective in helping people move towards shared understanding, purpose and action. Her speciality is steering and navigating change in complex environments that provide human services.
Denise’s passion is to assist organizations and inter-organizational collaborations in the public and quasi-public sector to move towards effective action that results in improved quality of life or services for community residents who are marginalized or require services. From 2008-10 she was recently the lead for the province of Ontario’s Age-Friendly Communities Initiative.

Denise also has a passion for new forms of democracy. In 2010 she is serving as the Research Director on a Citizens’ Forum initiative for the City of Hamilton.

Denise lives in Ancaster, Ontario with her husband, Ed. They have two adult daughters. Her interests include social, systems and personal transformation, hiking, yoga, gardening, reading, great food and wine, history and travel.