Journalism alumnus establishes fund to support reporting on resettlement in Canada
The Emerging Reporter Fund on Resettlement in Canada is a $5,000 fund available to an upper year or graduating journalism student to work on a project that is focused on an area of interest to new Canadians and/or refugees and immigrants to Canada. Recipients work to produce informed journalism on topics that impact newcomers to Canada, including first generation Canadians and/or refugees and topics of relevance to those communities. The fund was created thanks to a generous contribution from journalism alumnus, Robin Pascoe.
Read below for a Q&A with Pascoe about the fund.
The Emerging Reporter Fund on Resettlement in Canada is a very generous gift that will make a big difference in the lives and careers of multiple young journalists. What do you hope these journalists will create with this funding?
I want to help create a body of journalism written by students who have chosen to live in Canada. Their stories can offer much needed perspective to Canadians about their own country. Too many consumers of Canadian news have the impression that this is the worst country on the planet. This could not be further from the truth. We have many problems to be sure, problems we are working to rectify, but Canada remains the number one choice for thousands of families fleeing terrible and heartbreaking scenarios in their own countries or seeking better economic futures.
Immigrant and refugee stories of resilience in particular, are both informative and inspiring. They also reinforce the important contributions which newcomers make to our country which after all, is a country of immigrants. These are the reasons I also support several other wonderful initiatives that give voice to newcomer stories including The Shoe Project and the annual My Roots Writing Workshop for the Vancouver Writers Festival.
What made you want to make this contribution in support of young journalists?
Journalism, now more than ever, is crucial to properly functioning democracies. As a graduate of the Carleton School of Journalism, I want to help train a new generation of young journalists, and in particular, those who might not otherwise have the means to pursue a career in journalism.
Where did your own career take you after graduating from Carleton?
After graduating from Carleton in the mid-1970s, I pursued a traditional career as a journalist for five years in various CBC newsrooms like Halifax, Windsor and Winnipeg. But after marrying a Canadian foreign service officer in 1981, my career options changed dramatically. As a diplomatic spouse carrying a diplomatic passport, I could not get press credentials anywhere we were posted, for example to countries like China.
But all the skills I acquired as a journalist, mostly just being very curious about everything and asking a lot of questions, helped launch me on my next career as an author and publisher of five books about the challenges of the globally mobile family. We left the foreign service in the mid-1990s when my husband took a job in Vancouver, creating a not-for-profit network that marketed Canadian education to international students. Because my books were being widely used outside of Canada, I began to travel and lecture extensively as The Expat Expert, (the name of the website I created in 1998). I was invited to international schools, family and women’s organizations and to numerous multinational corporations. I encouraged that latter group in particular, as well as our own government, to change the way they treated families and in particular, the accompanying spouse.
When I stepped back from expats after 25 years, I joined my husband in the business venture our family had created called Maple Bear Global Schools, a multinational education company of private Canadian bilingual schools now operating in over 30 countries with over 500 schools at last count. At the time I signed on to help, we didn’t even have a brand! So all the skills I had learned first as a journalist and then as an author and publisher, I was able to put to good use in creating one. I eventually retired as Vice-President of Corporate Communications and Social Impact. On my watch, Maple Bear introduced Terry Fox to our students around the world who began fund-raising for cancer research, which sadly, knows no borders.
Maple Bear has been and continues to be a huge success, far greater than we ever dreamed. We sold 70 per cent of the company just weeks before the pandemic began but we continue to be engaged as board members. The financial success of Maple Bear has allowed us to support many other educational initiatives and good causes in Canada and abroad, including our own daughter’s environmental education not-for-profit called Finca Cantaros Environmental Association, in Costa Rica.
Is there a story you’d like to share from your own career that led you to create and support this award?
It was while traveling around the world promoting Maple Bear and the Canadian values I felt best exemplified our mission—empathy, humility and collaboration—that I experienced first-hand how positively people responded upon hearing we were Canadians. Far from being off people’s radar, Canada never disappeared. The truth out in the real world was very different from the picture of irrelevance being painted by politicians and the media back in Canada. The extraordinary success of Maple Bear was the proof of that. The world always and still wants more Canada.
I’m hoping that by hearing from young journalists who chose Canada, all that is good about this country can be reinforced but will also keep us on track and committed to what we need to work on to become an even better society. Ultimately, I would hope that their voices can unite Canadians in a shared vision and belief that our country is a role model for positive change in the world. We just need to hear more from people who chose Canada.