The Active Healthy Kids Canada Team

Jennifer Cowie Bonne, CEO
Jennifer has worked in the non-profit/ physical activity health promotion sector for over 20 years. Most recently, she spent fourteen years with Ophea, a non-profit organization in Ontario that supports healthy schools and communities, as Director of Partnerships and Public Affairs. Jennifer has significant experience with teaching and coaching children and youth of all ages, and enjoys walking, yoga and "shaking it up" by participating in at least one new sport or activity with her family each season. In 2013, Jennifer received a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contribution to physical activity promotion in Canada.
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Rachel Shantz, Marketing Manager
Rachel is a marketing professional with over twelve years of advertising agency experience on brands as diverse as Campbell’s Soup, Post Cereals and the Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership. She currently divides her time 50/50 between Active Healthy Kids Canada and ParticipACTION, working with the teams that guide marketing communications. Rachel keeps moving by playing recreational and inter-club tennis and is in her rookie season in a recreational women’s hockey league.
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Lindsay Whiting, Project Leader
Lindsay has worked in the non-profit sector for over 7 years with experience in both project and event management. Lindsay leads the teams developing the annual Active Healthy Kids Canada Report Card and the 2014 Global Summit on Physical Activity of Children. Lindsay's passion for sport was developed at an early age with participation in gymnastics, competitive swimming, baseball and softball. She has continued to volunteer with gymnastics and has been organizing events at the club level for over 10 years. Lindsay holds a Honours Business Administration Degree.
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Board of Directors

Chair and Vice Chair

Dr. Angelo Belcastro, Chair

Dr. Angelo Belcastro is currently professor and Chair of York University’s School of Kinesiology & Health Science. Previously he held a position at the University of New Brunswick, where he served as Vice President Academic and Professor of Kinesiology since 2003.

During his career Angelo has served as the founding Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Western Ontario. He also worked within the vice-president academic and provost’s office at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., which is known as one of Canada’s exclusive blending learning institutions.  This was preceded by serving as Director of the School of Rehabilitation Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C.

As well as academic leadership roles, Angelo’s research interests are focused in two major directions, exercise physiology - looking specifically at the health and fitness benefits for children and youth through physical activity; and exercise biochemistry – understanding the processes underlying muscle damage and repair linked to protease activation and muscle metabolism during exercise.

Dr. Belcastro has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He has served on a range of scholarly journal and editorial boards.

In addition to his academic interests, Dr. Angelo Belcastro’s professional contributions have been many with service to the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology, co-chair of Canada’s CSEP/Health Canada Steering Committee to develop Canada’s Physical Activity Guidelines and President-elect for the Canadian Council of University Physical Education, Kinesiology Administrators (CCUPEKA).

Cathie Kryzanowski, Vice Chair
Cathie is the General Manager of Saskatchewan in motion, a provincial movement aimed at increasing physical activity for children and youth. She is a former Chair of Coalition for Active Living.

Directors

Dr. Art Quinney, Past Chair
Senior Advisor to the Provost and a professor in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta Founder and past Chair of the Executive Management Group of the Alberta Centre for Active Living, Dr. Quinney is an exercise physiologist with a core interest in the health outcomes related to physical activity. He is past Chair of the Board of Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute, and past President of the Sport Medicine Council of Canada, the Canadian Society of Exercise Physiology and the Sport Science Association of Alberta.

Dr. Don Hunter
Don has a long history of work in municipal recreation and physical activity promotion in British Columbia and across Canada and now provides a wide range of consulting, including strategic and master planning, organizational and operations analysis, innovation and best practices, trends and issues analysis, facility and open space planning, business case analysis and performance management. He is a former Chair of the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association.

Dan Leeming
Dan is a founding partner of The Planning Partnership, a multi-disciplinary planning and design firm in Ontario. His area of expertise is in community planning at the regional and neighborhood levels, with an increasing amount of work focused on the development of healthy, sustainable communities. He is Adjunct Professor at the University of Guelph School of Landscape Architecture and lectures at a number of other universities.


Dr. François Trudeau
François Trudeau is the current Chair of the Département des sciences de l'activité physique at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières where he has been a professor since 1992. His other academic appointments have included professor at the School of Human Kinetics at Laurentian University. His main research interests include the role of school and sport in the adoption of active living. During his free time he coaches cross-country skiing and running.
 

Dr. Brian Timmons
Dr. Timmons is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics. He also holds status as Associate Member in the Department of Kinesiology, is a Scientist with the McMaster Child Health Research Institute, an Investigator with the CanChild Centre for Childhood Disability Research, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physical Education and Kinesiology at Brock University. Dr. Timmons was recruited into the Department of Pediatrics to continue the research program previously led by the late Dr. Oded Bar-Or. Today, this program is known as the Child Health & Exercise Medicine (CHEM) Program.

Judith Down
Judith is Director of the Alberta Centre for Active Living, a provincial research and education centre affiliated with the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta. The Centre is recognized provincially, nationally and internationally for developing and disseminating knowledge about physical activity and health. Judith is well known across Canada as an advocate of active living as a key factor in quality of life. She sits on a national committee for ParticipACTION, as well as other coalitions, such as the Alberta Active Living Partners and the Alberta Policy Coalition for Chronic Disease Prevention. Her career has included work in the education, non-profit and corporate sectors, including the delivery of organizational development services that contribute to workplace wellness.

Officers

Dr. Mark Tremblay, Chief Scientific Officer

Dr. Tremblay is the Director of the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute. His research interests include assessing the importance of physical education and physical activity on the health and wellness of children, and especially how physical activity behaviour affects future health outcomes. Dr. Tremblay has published extensively in the areas of childhood obesity, physical activity measurement, exercise physiology and exercise endocrinology.

Elio Antunes, Founder and Senior Advisor

A visionary leader, Elio has more than 20 years of experience in the physical activity sector. Prior to joining ParticipACTION as Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Partnerships, he was Executive Director of the Ontario Physical and Health Education Association (Ophea). Elio founded Active Healthy Kids Canada in 1994 and continues to play an instrumental role in the strategic direction of the organization.

Annual Report