Harvey McKinnon

Like most the fundraisers, I fell into the profession. Long ago, I started an anti-apartheid group on campus, met people at Oxfam, and to avoid writing my Master’s thesis in Sociology, volunteered 20 to 30 hours a week for Oxfam. I was on their National Board of Directors when I was 23, which shows their shoddy board. Eventually they hired me so I spent a decade at Oxfam learning a lot of things – in particular fundraising.

I set up an agency 25 years ago, with offices in Vancouver and Toronto and clients across Canada and the U.S. Direct-mail, monthly giving, digital, legacy, audits are a few of our specialties. For a decade, I ran a parallel business that produced social issue documentary films. But I got to travel the world making films on everything from women fighting AIDS, to the environmental crisis on the Black Sea, to William Shatner's biography.