E l e v e n o ut of Te n
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M
y husband, David Pecaut, has been called a visionary and a pragmatist, fearless and funny, passionate, compassionate, indefatigable, a bridge builder, a catalyst, a dynamo, a trailblazer, and “the smartest person I’ve ever met” by a variety of other smart people. Though David was a business leader and management consultant, most of these accolades flowed from his volunteer work. He called himself a civic entrepreneur — someone who convened diverse people of goodwill for the betterment of the community. While David was a native of Sioux City, Iowa, he chose Toronto as the beneficiary of his formidable enthusiasm. He was thrilled by the openness and vibrancy that he discovered on his arrival here in the 1980s, and he wanted to help make Toronto the most socially and culturally dynamic urban centre in the world as a model for other cities. “No matter what computer is invented, or how powerful, David Pecaut proved the superiority of the human brain in his ability to imagine,” said John Tory, David’s successor as chair of the Toronto City Summit Alliance, the umbrella group for much of David’s pro bono work. “I’ve heard David described as a popcorn machine of ideas. He also had
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the rare ability to follow through and to persuade others to rally around. The day I went to his office to recruit him for City Summit was the luckiest day for Toronto in recent civic history.” When Toronto was in the doldrums because of the SARS scare, David helped the city shake its stigma and restore its tourism industry by chairing the Toronto03 Alliance, launched by a flamboyant Rolling Stones rock concert attracting four hundred thousand people. David also co-founded Luminato, the international festival that each spring showcases the world’s finest artists to audiences of over a million. “It’s a lovely thing when you confide your dreams to someone and that person can imagine them as well as you can,” says Karen Kain, artistic director of the National Ballet and a member of Luminato’s artistic advisory committee. David negotiated effectively with every level of government and every political party, both in and out of power. He also worked as easily with the homeless, new immigrants, and poverty activists as with billionaires, cultural czars, corporate CEOs, educators, bank presidents, and labour leaders. Keenly aware of inequality of opportunity, he helped bring educational and social resources to the GTA’s poverty pockets with the Strong Neighbourhood Task Force. He also embraced the Pathways to Education program, flinging university doors open to youth in danger of dropping out or falling prey to gang culture. “He would listen to a lot of chatter — blah blah blah — then pick out the one key point and drive it home,” remembers Sam Duboc, chair of Pathways. David co-chaired Modernizing Income Security for Working Age Adults Task Force with Susan Pigott, CEO of St. Christopher House, an effort that dramatically improved the health and social assistance the federal and Ontario governments would provide for the working poor. “With David, it was always fast-forward,” says Susan. “He made a phenomenal difference in improving public policy in a way that directly affected lives. He was also the most generous-spirited person I’ve ever met.” As a great believer in mentorship, David founded Career Edge, a national youth internship program that has helped ten thousand university and college grads launch their careers. Because he considered immigrants an undervalued resource, he and Ratna Omidvar, president of the Maytree Foundation, a private organization that worked to support immigrants, fight poverty, and build community, founded the Toronto 12
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Region Immigrant Employment Council. TRIEC has helped thousands of skilled newcomers overcome cultural barriers and find work worthy of their talents. This was followed by DiverseCity, an initiative to help visible minorities achieve civic leadership. David used his knowledge of international markets to help the Toronto Region Research Alliance attract high-tech global companies to the Golden Horseshoe. He also worked with the provincial government to help Ontario position itself as the location of choice for investment. “Every all-star team has a superstar, and that was David,” said corporate executive and TRRA chair Courtney Pratt. “Gretzky knew where a puck would go, but David managed to get the puck to go where he wanted it.” Even after David had undergone surgery for colorectal cancer in 2004, he co-chaired Greening Greater Toronto, created to tackle air and water pollution, energy use, and waste disposal. David was determined to make the GTA the greenest area in North America. In all his enterprises, David credited the people he convened around the table for finding community solutions to community problems. He was always backed by a crack fact-finding team from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he was a senior partner. One BCG colleague described the meeting in which he recruited their support: “He spoke for an hour, no notes, no slides, laying out all the ways we could transform the city, supported by facts that he insisted be of the highest quality. He would never accept hearsay.” David considered anyone useful to a project to be only a phone call away. Alan Broadbent, chair of Maytree, once remarked, “I could imagine David cold-calling the Pope and expecting a call back by the end of the week.” Naki Osutei, project director of the Toronto City Summit Alliance, summed up her experience of David: “I was Pecauted, which means someone David has taken from the impossible to the possible in three to five steps, including an action plan.” Many people used “social entrepreneur” to describe David’s unique brand of social activism. His ability to connect all the dots, merging personal, professional, and public pursuits, was the hallmark of his civic leadership. David saw himself and others in this mode as “someone who sees the most important thing we do, outside of our families, as the work we do together in building a better society, and doing it collectively.” 13
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Globe and Mail feature writer Sandra Martin would later capture David’s remarkable range and constant swirl of activity in his obituary: “It is tempting to imagine David Pecaut washing up on a desert island in the South Pacific. He would dry himself off, figure out a way to convene an international summit on global warming, followed by an e-commerce task force on innovative ways to export coconuts. And once he had tapped into the brain waves of his far-flung global partners, he would convince them to join a diversity round table and a mentorship initiative across the diverse economic and social sectors of the minute island,” she wrote. “Naturally, he would persuade a series of strong, capable women to run these projects. Then he would blue sky an annual cultural festival that would attract tourism dollars, enhance local artistic standards, and build international audiences. And he would do all of this for free, earning nothing more than the praise of the islanders and the satisfaction of making his island a more innovative, competitive and diverse place.” David would have enjoyed that description of himself. ——— Because I worked professionally and lived daily with David, I knew both his public and private selves. Contrary to widespread rumour that he had no “off switch,” he did know how to relax, but usually in an energetic way — playing basketball in our driveway, jogging a few kilometres, or riffing on the piano, perhaps with a baby on his lap. We had four daughters, two that came as a bonus with me when we married and two that followed. He was a remarkable father — always accessible, always playful, always bursting with knowledge that he was happy to share. His many quirks were a continuing source of affectionate family teasing: his perpetual singing, his obliviousness to decorating changes, his storehouse of arcane information, his total lack of interest in material things, his inability to match one shoe with the other. Fashion was his victim. David was the perfect life partner. He retained his childlike sense of wonder about everything and everybody. It was impossible for David to talk to anyone without coming up with a fascinating piece of information or an idea that might be woven into some grand scheme. He 14
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was a lightning strike, a force of nature, but his priorities were always real and constant. No matter how high he might fly, it was always his family first, then friends and community. We kept him from flying too close to the sun. In the natural order of events, David would have written his own memoir. When it became obvious even to him, the supreme optimist, that his time was running out, he began to make copious notes in the spidery hand only a few of us could decipher. He eagerly recorded interviews with friends, colleagues, and family, including me and our daughters. When his lungs became so choked by cancer that he could barely speak, he whispered and coughed out his words because he still had so many things he wanted to say. Throughout his life, David was always in a hurry, always planning and doing at a frenetic pace. The very end of his life could not have been more different. He was serene and composed, loath to leave us but ready to enter the next life. David died peacefully at home on December 14, 2009, surrounded by his adoring family and mourned by his many friends.
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