Gordon Cressy: Our Speaker on Tuesday April 28th, 2025
By Nancy McFadden
This is a great time to honour life-long volunteerism, social innovation, inclusion and community spirit. Gord Cressy represents all of these.
Gord grew up in North Toronto but escaped asap on a CUSO service trip to Trinidad. The connection he made to black youth there grew in the following years in Chicago; in various roles in Toronto and ultimately in an exceptional effort that he and his wife made to found a YMCA in Tobago in 2008-2010.
Gord returned to Toronto for his Masters of Social Work at University of Toronto. He then entered politics as a City councillor and ultimately exited as the Chair of the Toronto Board of Education. His community service continued in an astounding breadth of organizations including: United Way, Canadian Tire Foundation, Take Our Kids to Work Day, YMCA Canada, CUSO, Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, Harmony Movement, Urban Alliance on Race Relations and Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Creativity. He also taught for 15 years and served in major fundraising roles as Vice President at the University of Toronto and Ryerson, and then President of George Brown. The list is dizzying. He has been honoured in various ways including the Order of Ontario in 2016.
His talk highlighted his varied career: selling Canadian Christmas trees in Trinidad; a car rally to win a local election in Ward 7; recruiting key players to make his fund raising fly; singing songs to win a 400 vote margin; introducing diversity to the United Way Board; hosting Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela in Toronto; a hunger strike for gay rights; and launching ‘Take our Kids to Work’ and ‘Jump Start’. Each story was riddled with accounts of significant needs, innovative strategies and unbridled humour.
His key strategies included:
- Go out to listen and learn, not just help people.
- Start where your listeners are at.
- Thank the loser, not only the winner in elections when so much personal volunteer time is at stake.
- Use compassion not just words to win over supporters.
- Go out to bring people in.
- If it is the right thing to do, then do it.
- If you cannot do it yourself, find someone who can.
- Keep in touch with old friends.
- It’s nice to win but the important thing is to play.
He opened and closed with a quote by T.E. Lawrence: All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” Gord, by this definition, you are indeed a dangerous man. Thank you for sharing the accounts of such great causes that we now sometimes just assume with such great humour. It was a delightful morning.
If you want to learn more obtain his book: Gordon Cressy Tells Great Stories by Gordon Cressy published by Iguana.
Probus Club of Kingsway-Islington 