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QCGN 2010-2011 Board of Directors
Front row: Marion Standish (Vice-President, Towshippers’ Association), Linda Leith (President, Quebec Writers Federation), Robert Donnelly (Past-President,Voice of English-speaking Quebec) and Heather Dickson (Secretary, Quebec Community Newspaper Association). Back row: Ronald Mundle (Gaspé), Anthony Dumas (Lower North Shore), Nicola Johnson (co-chair, QCGN Youth Standing Committee), John Walker (English-Speaking Catholic Council), Sylvia Martin-Laforge (Director General), Carol Meindl (Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations) and Roderick MacLeod (Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network). Missing from photo are Mark McLaughlin (Treasurer, Towshippers’ Association), Bradley Dottin (Black Community Resource Centre), Ann Marie Powell (Megantic English-Speaking Community Development Corporation), and Guiliano D’Andrea (Canadian-Italian Business and Professional Association Inc.)
The Executive
Leading the Network in its important work over the coming months will be President Linda Leith and Past President Robert Donnelly (centre), Vice President Marion Standish (left) and Secretary Heather Dickson (right).
The QCGN President, Linda Leith
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and educated in Belfast, London, Basel, Montreal, and Paris, Linda Leith has been active in the English Montreal literary milieu for 30 years. In 1997 she created Blue Metropolis Foundation, the mission of which is to bring people of different cultures together to share the pleasures of reading and writing. The foundation organizes a wide range of literary and educational activities in English in every region of Quebec and in French across Canada and is best known for the multilingual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. Blue Metropolis Foundation was nominated for the Grand prix du Conseil des Arts de Montréal in 2001 and in 2007 and for the Prix Jacques-Couture awarded for “rapprochement intercultural” by Quebec’s Ministère de la Citoyenneté et immigration in 2010. Leith was also the recipient of the first Award of Excellence – Linguistic Duality, presented by Official-Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser in April 2009. She was elected to the board of Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN) in September 2009 and has been a member of the Arts, Culture and Heritage committee of the QCGN’s Greater Montreal Community Development Initiative (GMCDI) since 2008. The author of three novels, her most recent book is the memoir Marrying Hungary. She has also published in Quebec, Canadian, Irish, Hungarian and American publications and has taught in the Departments of English of John Abbott College, McGill and Concordia University, where she is Adjunct Professor of English.
QCGN's Board Past President, Robert Donnelly
Robert Donnelly grew up in the 1950s in the Irish neighborhood of downtown Quebec City where he attended St. Patrick’s High School. He studied at Laval University, Concordia University, and did his graduate work in English Literature at the University of Ottawa before returning to Quebec City to become a professor at Champlain St. Lawrence College. Retired after 32 years in the education sector, he has been active in the English-speaking community for years. He was on the board of Voice of English-speaking Quebec in the early eighties and returned to the VEQ board in 2003. He was president of VEQ from 2005 to 2007 when he became active on the board of the Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN). In 2006-2007 he served as a member of the QCGN Executive Committee, before being elected President of the QCGN in June 2007 for a two-year mandate. He was re-acclaimed for a third-year in 2009 and will continue to sit as past-president of the Network following the Annual General Assembly of the QCGN on June 11. Donnelly worked for two years as a volunteer member of the Commission d’évaluation de l’enseignement collégiale (CÉEC) General Education Program Evaluation Committee from in the mid 1990s and was a member of the Supervising Committee of the English Exit Exam from 1996 till 2008 for the Ministère de l’éducation, du loisir et du sport. He worked as a freelance hockey journalist with Canadian Press for 25 years and writes and produces plays and musicals in his spare time.
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