Our Board

He engages expert advisors and worked directly with municipal public servants that are developing and implementing smart city projects and initiatives, and has helped develop over 50 learning products on topics such as open data, digital literacy, and data governance.

Nabeel is a skilled facilitator and public speaker with over a decade of experience, and has delivered over a dozen webinars and workshops on smart city issues alone. He is also a member of the Digital Communities Advisory Panel at the Centre for Free Expression at Ryerson University.

Nabeel has a background in social enterprise, community engagement, social innovation, and international development. He has a Masters in Environmental Studies at York University, specializing in urban planning, where his research focused on big data and urban planning, as well as a certificate in public administration from Ryerson University, Toronto and a degree in business administration from the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi.

Nabeel currently serves on the board of the Tessellate Institute, a charitable Muslim research institute, and was selected as an Aga Khan Foundation Canada Fellow in 2013-2014. In his spare time, Nabeel enjoys hiking, cooking, watching or playing cricket, and for a few glorious weeks in the summer, enjoying Pakistani mangoes.

She has led grassroots sustainability initiatives within different corporations, and is currently a Sustainability and Climate Change Consultant with PwC Canada. As a 2021-22 Action Canada Fellow, Laura sits on the Board since 2024, and is involved in other initiatives like the Climate Reality Project, Leading Change Canada, where she also serves on the Board, and One Young World Montreal 2024.

Within the Global Shapers Community, an initiative of the World Economic Forum, she served as Canada’s first Community Champion and Montreal Hub Curator. Originally from Colombia, Laura loves reading, and spending time outdoors with her toddler, husband, and dog.

From promoting the Francophonie culture to participating in the upcoming Sierra Leone elections monitoring, I am proud to promote Canadian values in West Africa. I am also committed to gender equality efforts in diplomacy by serving as the Women’s Network Co-Chair at GAC leading the largest employment equity group to empower women in leadership roles. I am passionate about Canadian foreign policy, the United Nations, and diversity issues.

I am a former Action Canada Fellow ’22 and current Board Member that organized the 20^th anniversary of the Action Canada alumni conference. In my spare time I run marathons, snowboard at Whistler, and volunteered for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. I am a graduate of Princeton and Cambridge universities and recipient of the Operational Service Medal for Afghanistan.

As an American-born, Toronto-raised transplant to Prince Edward Island who has found his heart in Charlottetown, John is an advocate on PEI for solutions that improve education, fitness, entrepreneurial, and social outcomes with his participation in Boards including Pride PEI, Fusion Charlottetown, The Charlottetown Film Society, Videogames PEI, the Canadian Interactive Alliance, The ORDER of The Wallace McCain Institute, and with the PEI organizers of TechStars Startup Weekend. Outside of his work optimizing customer experiences at RevIQ for his clients, his passion projects include finding a permanent community enterprise to engage PEI’s 2SLGBTQIA+ community with a permanent venue, developing a speechtext-focused syntactic interpretation tool to permit synchronous fact-checking in political debates, and working with business owners across Atlantic Canada to harmonize the small business investor tax credits across the Greater Atlantic Area. When he’s not travelling internationally to visit global clients, John spends his time downhill skiing, sailing, or – when the weather isn’t cooperating – catching a retro flick at Charlottetown’s City Cinema.

Previously, Katie was Director of Policy & PPF Media at the Public Policy Forum, where she led key projects on child care, journalism, immigration, and digital connectivity, and enhanced the organization’s presence in Atlantic Canada. As a 2019/20 Action Canada Fellow, she focused on employment integration for refugees and the evolving job market. Katie has also created four policy podcasts and hosts the UNB Alumni podcast, Unbeknownst.

Passionate about public service, Katie was a Senior Advisor in the Office of the Premier of New Brunswick, advancing legislation and stakeholder relations in women’s equality, labour, and innovation. In 2023, she was recognized as a top innovator by Atlantic Business Magazine. She serves on the Boards of the Human Development Council and Action Canada and received the Proudly UNB Young Alumni Achievement Award in 2024.

After a brief stay in Toronto, he moved with his wife to the Yukon in 2009. After a contract with the Council of Yukon First Nations, he joined the territorial public service in 2011 where he supported various departments for ten years in the area of policy analysis. In 2021, he joined the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada where he is currently the Director of Corporate Services for the Yukon Region.

Involved in his community, he was elected vice-president of the Association franco-yukonnaise in June 2011. In 2013, he was elected school trustee of the Commission scolaire francophone du Yukon (CSFY) and assumed the presidency of the council of commissioners in 2015. During his presidency, the CSFY signed a settlement agreement with the Government of Yukon in 2020 and opened Yukon’s first French-language secondary school the same year: Centre scolaire secondaire communautaire Paul-Émile-Mercier. Active on the national scene, he has represented the CSFY on the board of directors of the Fédération nationale des conseils scolaires (FNCSF) since 2015 and was, from 2019 to 2021, second vice-president of this organization.

In addition to his involvement with the francophone community, Mr. Blais has served on numerous boards of directors including the Board of Directors of the Yukon Human Rights Commission. He currently sits on the boards of the Yukon Liquor Corporation and Action Canada.  In 2020, Jean-Sébastien Blais was named a Fellow of Action Canada by the Public Policy Forum in recognition of his leadership. The same year, Francopresse recognized him as one of the ten influential personalities of the Canadian Francophonie.

Mr. Blais is married to Dorothy Williams, a teacher. Together they are the parents of three children.

Gabrielle earned an engineering degree from McMaster University. She was heavily engaged with engineering outreach in parallel to her studies, developing and executing programming for young people across Canada. Gabrielle also spent three years working as the inaugural Outreach Officer for the University of Oxford’s engineering department. Through this work she developed an appreciation of the institutional barriers many young people face outside of education in reaching their potential. Gabrielle now works to demystify our governmental institutions through her YouTube channel. She speaks in long-form about Canadian civics and issues of the day in a way that is entertaining and engaging. She invites Canadians to join her on her journey of learning the common language of government, current governmental structures, and how these structures can be shaped with care to build a society that works for people.

Gabrielle started her professional career at Deloitte after winning an interview at the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference. Gabrielle currently works for Jacobs, a multinational engineering firm, and has been involved with projects including sewer rehabilitation, waterfront redevelopment, and transit operations.

Umang is a competition/antitrust lawyer at Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP. She advises on all aspects of competition law, including merger review, abuse of dominance, misleading advertising, criminal price-fixing investigations and general compliance.

Previously Umang clerked for the Honourable Andrew D. Little, Chair of the Competition Tribunal, at the Federal Court in Ottawa. Early in her career, she worked as a Competition Law Officer in the Monopolistic Practices Directorate of the Competition Bureau, and on amendments to the Competition Act as Special Advisor to the Deputy Commissioner, Competition Promotion Branch.

He has over 25 years of volunteer experience leading different local, national and international non-for-profit organizations and became a philanthropist in 2023, when the Endowment Fund for Action Canada was created.

With a bachelor’s degree in political science from Université de Montréal and a bidisciplinary master’s degree in political science and economics from Université Laval, Gabriel was part of the first Action Canada cohort.