About RealizeU
RealizeU is an online multidisciplinary school that helps you realize your leadership potential by strengthening your practical skills, capacity, and confidence to lead in today's complex environments.
We're a part of Realize Strategies, a Vancouver-based global award-winning B Corp boutique consulting firm that takes a human-centred approach to help organizations achieve high performance and resilience. With decades of experience, RealizeU was created to teach the Realize methodology that has successfully helped leaders, teams, and organizations to lead with purpose and become more resilient, innovative, and creative.
We're a part of Realize Strategies, a Vancouver-based global award-winning B Corp boutique consulting firm that takes a human-centred approach to help organizations achieve high performance and resilience. With decades of experience, RealizeU was created to teach the Realize methodology that has successfully helped leaders, teams, and organizations to lead with purpose and become more resilient, innovative, and creative.
Our Instructors
All of our instructors are experts in their fields and active consultants with years of experience spanning across both private and public sectors. Our education team leverages applied industry insights and experiences along with deep topical knowledge to help students gain practical tools and strategies to handle current and future workplace challenges with resilience and empathy.
Meet our core education team below:
John Kay
CEO and Senior Instructor
CPA, CMA, MBA
John thrives on the challenge of unlocking the potential of people and organizations who are working to build a better tomorrow. With over two decades of experience, John uses his vision and expertise to look beyond limits to drive sustainable, transformative organizational change through strategy, governance, culture, and business model innovation. He has held a range of senior and executive positions in both the private and public sector and has worked on a vast range of projects spanning social services, real estate, insurance, finance, food and beverage, education, arts, tourism, and more. Currently, John serves as chair on several non-profit and co-op boards across the country such as Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada (CMC), among others.
Alison Marshall
Principal Consultant and Senior Instructor
MBA
Alison Marshall has over twenty years of consulting experience supporting public-sector and non-profit organizations in strategic planning, organizational design, and change management. With both an MBA and a BA in Psychology informing her approach, Alison is uniquely skilled at helping institutions identify opportunities, navigate challenges, and optimize strategies to support their mission. She has worked at Realize Strategies for fourteen years and is an expert in facilitating in-person and virtual sessions with Boards, leadership teams, and management groups. Alison’s people-centred method to strategy and development ensures that the most valuable resources of an organization, its employees, are considered throughout the process.
Jenn Fong
Consultant and Senior Instructor
Jenn Fong is a governance professional who takes a people- and purpose-driven approach to her work. Her expertise includes board and director evaluations, governance restructuring, and governance policy development among others. She explores her client’s pain-points with a collaborative mindset, analyzes the practice, people, and dynamics issues underlying their governance problems, and helps governance teams bring the solutions to life and increase their effectiveness. Jenn has helped a wide variety of clients including small, medium, and large not-for-profits, crowns, regulated professional bodies, as well as societies/associations.
Laurie Wilson
Consultant and Senior Instructor
As a social scientist, Laurie Wilson takes a people-centric lens and uses organizational psychology to design resilient and adaptive organizational frameworks. Applying her expertise in risk and resilience, Laurie partners with organizations to assess and manage risk, develop people systems and behaviours that foster long-term growth and resilience, and cultivate powerful employee experiences. As a consultant with Realize Strategies, Laurie helps clients to enhance their organizational capabilities and adaptive capacity; identify strategically-aligned leadership candidates; augment their knowledge management; and optimize their organizational structure.
Brad Boyce
Senior Instructor
Through twenty years of experience in finance and procurement, Brad has accumulated a comprehensive understanding of the financial ecosystem of community-based organizations. Coupled with his intuition about all things numbers, Brad has developed the tools required to interpret financials and navigate the big picture. With a keen eye for efficiencies, Brad is an expert on building a sound organizational foundation and finding creative solutions to financial issues. Fuelled by a passion for social enterprise, co-operatives, and all purpose-driven organizations, he loves to immerse himself in the details of an organization, from top to bottom.