Joanne Jackson Personal Profile

Joanne Jackson comes from solid Maritime and Scandinavian stock and was born in Toronto where she lived until the age of 22. She studied English and Medieval studies at the University of Toronto and graduated in 1978 with a B.A. Very early on, Joanne discovered you could fight city hall and win. By the tender age of five, she had already attended several city hall meetings organized by her community-minded grandmother, who gathered together large groups of residents from the local neighbourhood and headed to city hall to make their opinions known. The

meetings were successful in protecting the local neighbourhood against block busting. Those early town hall meetings inspired Joanne to pursue other important community issues. At the age of 17, Joanne was independently involved in pressuring city hall to keep her local Yorkville library open in order to maintain the vitality of the neighborhood. Her early experiences with city hall led her to the inspiring conclusion that a lot of effective and valuable work gets done behind the scenes.

While living in Stratford, Joanne obtained valuable experience as a board member while sitting on both the Stratford Library and Northwestern Regional Library Boards. She made an important transition in her career when Joanne and Phil moved from Stratford to Sudbury. In Sudbury, she went from sitting on co-op and nonprofit housing boards to being a property manager; the experience was like going from theory to hands-on practice. She had learned a lot at the community level about hiring building consultants, architects and contractors -interestingly the transition wasn't such a big step. She developed an expertise in project management, overseeing the day-to-day activities of collecting rent, arranging for repairs and meeting with the board of directors.

For Joanne, the exciting and challenging area of land development is where she wants to be. The dynamic process of development requires an eclectic set of skills that must be brought to the table in a creative way in order for the project to work. Because of her extensive experience, she is able to carry skills from one project to the next. But each project is unique and any carry-over of skills is enhanced with her broad expertise and experience. For Joanne, there is nothing more fulfilling than seeing all the pieces of the "development puzzle" come together and for the client to experience the satisfaction of a completed, successful project.

Joanne and her husband Phil work together as a team with clients from project inception. When a client has attained the necessary funding and they've made the decision to go forward with their project, Phil and Joanne derive enormous satisfaction from knowing that they have been part of a successful process. Joanne is the researcher and the collector of information. Phil's strength lies in implementing the information, adding value to it, looking to the road ahead, reworking a plan if necessary and moving to "Plan B" if required.

Joanne is an avid reader and particularly enjoys an "escape" into fiction and romance novels. An enthusiastic gardener, starting in the spring, Phil swears that Joanne has the most expensive vegetable garden in Bell's Corners, where the local wildlife take advantage of the wide variety of vegetables that she successfully grows.

Boards, Committees, Memberships and Activities