COTF Board of Governors
COTF is managed by a volunteer Board of Governors composed of occupational therapists and representatives of related organizations, educational institutions and industry. These individuals provide fiscal and legal oversight of the Foundation's resources and ensure the Foundation's programs are consistent with its mandate.
Huguette Picard, President
Huguette joined the COTF Board in April 2006. She is currently at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Huguette is a Past President of ACOTUP and CAOT. She is an occupational therapist.
Liz Taylor, CAOT President
Liz is President of the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists. She became a member of the COTF Board on October 1, 2008. She serves as a liaison between the two organizations. She is an occupational therapist.
Shawn Hoyland
Shawn Hoyland has worked within the health care sector in the community and in the long term care setting for a number of years. He is currently the Director of Business Development at Motion Specialties. He believes in the value occupational therapy an the value that occupational therapists bring to clients. He has worked along with them to see these benefits being realized by the individuals who they assist. As part of COTF, Shawn would like to strengthen the role and recognition occupational therapy has in our health care system and continue to support and grow new endeavours to further education and research of occupational therapy that will help provide more active productive lives for the many Canadians that benefit from the endeavours of occupational therapists. Shawn joined the board in April 2008.
Juliette E. Cooper
Juliette is an Occupational Therapist who is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Occupational Therapy, University of Manitoba.
Juliette strongly believes that research is essential to the future of the profession of occupational therapy and that COTF is essential to advancing occupational therapy research in Canada. She believes that COTF not only funds occupational therapy research, but builds occupational therapy research capacity through scholarships. Occupational therapy research will grow as research capacity grow.
Juliette has experience fundraising at a number of levels at the University of Manitoba. She served for six years on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Musculoskeletal Health and Arthrtiis of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and also served as a grant reviewer for national, provincial and local research funding agencies. Her goal is" to raise the awareness of COTF among occupational therapists in Canada, and by doing so, to increase the number of donors to COTF."
Juliette joined the board in October 2009.
Jan MIller Polgar
Jan is an Occupational Therapist. She is a Professor at the University of Western Ontario.
Jan is interested in COTF because COTF is the sole Canadian organization that is focused on supporting research to advance the profession of occupational therapy. Jan wants "to participate in its expanded growth." She believes in COTF because in recent years, COTF has made strong progress in establishing itself as a source of funding for quality research in occupational therapy. Links have been made with industry and with other funding bodies, such as CIHR, that allow it to maximize the direct contributions and provide greater support to occupational therapy researchers. It is the only national organization that focuses on occupational therapy research and provides a means of funding for clinicians who do not always have a university link and provides funding for clinically based projects that are much less likely to attract funding from other sources.
Man brings many years of experience with review of grant and scholarship applications at all levels, including national and international. She also has many years of writing successful grant applications at a variety of levels. Supervision of graduate students at both masters' and doctoral levels, including mentoring them in submission of scholarship applications. She was the Chair of Interdisciplinary Graduate Program and Research Based OT Master's Program. She is currently the Associate Dean of Scholarship, responsible for research and graduate programs in the Faculty of Health Science at the University of Western Ontario.
Jan's main objective during her tenure on the board is to be able to assist with the development of partnering applications to expand the capacity of COTF to support occupational therapy research.
Jan the board in October 2009.
Pam Wener
Pamela (Pam) Wener is an Occupational Therapist who is a faculty member at the University of Manitoba.
Volunteering is an important part of Pam's life. She has a desire to offer volunteer time to her profession. Previous experience on boards similar to COTF has taught her a great deal, which has provided her with the skills to offer to COTF. Pam believes that "in order for the profession to move forward, research is critical and building research capacity is essential, and to this end, I believe that financial support from the profession for research and graduate studies is a must for occupational therapy's survival."
Pam has served on a number of professional board of directors such as the Manitoba Society of Occupational Therapists (Co-Chair of Professional Development) and Association of Occupational Therapists (the former name for the current College of Occupational Therapists of Manitoba) as well as many boards that are not related to occupational therapy such as: Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, Jewish Child and Family Services, and the Steering Committee for Persons with Disabilities, just to name a few. Most, if not all of the boards, have fundraising and public relations as part of the duties of the board of directors. In Pam's over 20 years of volunteer experience on these various boards, she has gained skills in grant writing, fundraising activities and public relations, and it is these skills that she brings with her to COTF.
According to Pam, "the growth in occupational therapy research over the past 25 years has been exceptional and COTF has played a vital role in supporting this evolution. I believe that with continued growth, the Foundation can become the major supporter of OT research in Canada. By helping to make COTF relevant to all Canadian occupational therapists, I believe that we can reach our goal of significantly increasing our revenues during the next five years. "
Pam joined the board in January 2009.
