Anna Gainey

Building for the Future

The new Camp Kawartha Environment Centre in Peterborough, Ontario, is much more than a building. It stands as a symbol of perseverance, cooperation, and promise, and the story of how it came to exist is as interesting as the unique features of the structure itself. Promoted as one of the most environmentally sustainable buildings in Canada, the Centre is located on the wildlife sanctuary at Trent University. Beginning in 1985, Camp Kawartha has been offering programs to schoolchildren and to the wider community with the goal of promoting environmental stewardship and sustainable living practices. The Camp now has a truly distinctive building in which to operate, a construction that features straw bale insulation, geothermal heating, composting toilets, and a solar power system that provides electricity to the building and feeds excess energy into the grid. The environmental programs provided in the Centre will unfold in a space that is itself a remarkable educational tool!

Recently at the official opening, approximately one hundred fifty people shared in a ceremony that illuminated the way in which various individuals and groups in the Peterborough community joined together to help construct the Environment Centre. From the very beginning a primary partner has been the Gainey Foundation, a charitable corporation established by the family of Montreal Canadiens General Manager Bob Gainey. It was set up to honour the lives of Mr. Gainey’s wife, Cathy, and his daughter, Laura.

Many Canadians know the recent history of the Gainey family. In June 1995, Cathy Gainey passed away following a lengthy battle with brain cancer. More than a decade later, Laura Gainey died at sea after being swept overboard by a wave while sailing on a tall ship in the Atlantic Ocean in December 2006. These tragedies left Bob Gainey, his son, Steve, and two daughters, Anna and Colleen, with a need to move forward positively by finding an appropriate way to honour Cathy and Laura. The desire took shape to establish a Foundation that would support other charitable organizations dedicated to offering environmental and arts education programs for young people. These were initiatives that had meant a great deal to Laura Gainey in particular.

After the ceremony marking the opening of the Environment Centre, Anna Gainey, executive director of the Gainey Foundation, took a few moments to reflect on how the project came to fruition. In the first round of grant applications that came across her desk, there was a proposal from Camp Kawartha. It seemed to fit well with the objectives that her family had formulated, and slowly things began to fall into place. An agreement was reached with Trent University to build the Centre on land owned by the university. People in the Sustainable Building Design and Construction program at Fleming College became interested, and students in that program actually helped to build the Environment Centre. One wonderful aspect of the official opening of the building was having many students who helped in the construction process come forward to indicate exactly how they had contributed. In addition to the financial support of the Gainey Foundation, many other donors weighed in to support the project. Included were significant donations from the Government of Ontario, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, and the City of Peterborough.

A sense of genuine excitement was in the air throughout the opening ceremonies. Clearly this stemmed from the fact that many people and organizations had come together with a common ambition, and now were able to share in its realization. In his remarks to the assembled group, Bob Gainey stated that support for the goals of the Gainey Foundation had been found ‘most clearly and dramatically’ in Peterborough, which is his hometown. The opening of the Camp Kawartha Environment Centre felt very much like a triumph in ways both spoken and silently felt. If architecture speaks to our deepest ambitions and represents the ideals of communities, the people of Peterborough now have a building that they will be able to showcase for many years, a structure that will help teach everyone who visits it to live more generously with the natural environment.

In this interview, which took place inside the Environment Centre, Anna Gainey discusses the development of the project, the future goals of the Gainey Foundation, and how the establishment of the Foundation helped to pull her family out of a period of great sadness.

CI: I learned a lot today about the Camp Kawartha project, but what I am curious about is the original spark that set the process in motion.

AG: The first spark was a proposal submitted by Camp Kawartha to the Gainey Foundation in 2008. It was our first round of grant applications. We didn’t really know, as a Foundation, what we would receive. It was the first time that we were going to go through the process. This was one of about a hundred applications that came into our office that, as a family, we reviewed. It was something that struck a chord and we pursued, and here we are!

CI: The energy behind the Gainey Foundation was the ideas and the outlook that your sister had. When you look at this today, how would you characterize how your sister might have reacted if she had been able to see it?

AG: I think the whole process of how this building came to be, particularly the students who built it – I think that this is the kind of place that she would have loved to have been a part of. She loved kids. There are so many components of this that are a good fit with the kind of person that my sister was. That’s one of the reasons, when I say there was a spark, there was something very obvious that jumped out at us and spoke to us, and said that this was exactly the type of thing that would make a good tribute. We thought that, if we could go somewhere like this with the Foundation and the money that we’ve raised, we would be really pleased with that.

CI: One of the most touching things here today, even for someone like me who has not been connected to the process other than to know that it was happening, was having the students here who had literally put their hands to the project. At what point in time did that idea come forward, to use the collaboration between Trent and Fleming, and to have students at Fleming work on the project?

AG: When we proceeded with the Camp, initially we gave them a small grant to do further investigation and to see how this would look, and who else they could get on board. It was really important to us that this be a community project. We were prepared to step in and support the project in a substantial way provided that there was a sense that other people in the community felt the same way, and that the project would have the support it needed, not only to stand here, but to be not an empty building but a building that was used, and well used, and well run. I think that process of the initial grant, the seed money to allow them to talk about it and get out there and attract other people, it hit a radar somewhere at Fleming and this program, and right away my understanding is that Chris Magwood and his program were very keen to do this project. From there, Trent came on board with the land, and obviously you heard about all the different donors and contributors. It was very organic.


One special feature of the Environment Centre is the 'can and bottle wall', an art work that features recycled materials shaped into the image of a tree. Photo: www.campkawartha.ca.


CI: You mention wanting the building to be very much a part of the community. What is the short-term thinking for what is going to happen in the building, and over time how do you see it being used by the community?

AG: It will be managed by the Camp, which offers excellent programming year-round. They have a lot of experience in working with kids and teaching kids. That is part of where this came from; they wanted to be able to do more. I’m confident that the Camp, and their experience, is going to keep this building humming and busy and full of kids.

Teachers at Trent, as well – I think that’s a great angle. The teaching faculty is just up the street. Any teacher in training at Trent University is going to have an opportunity to come here and learn how to incorporate environmental education in their classrooms as they go out into the world, leave Trent, and become teachers in their communities.

There are a lot of ways that this building will be used. You could have a reception here, have a wedding here; it was designed really to be multifunctional, multipurpose. Certainly the community is aware that it’s here. I’m confident that people will want to use it and make good use of it.

CI: This building is very much a symbol of what is possible in sustainable building. Have you had people contact you since the project got underway, asking you about the development of it because they are interested in doing something similar in their own communities?

AG: We’ve had grant requests this year that were sort of similar. There were some similarities, but nothing quite of this scale, I would say, at this point. But we’re certainly open to exploring the possibility of using the footprint, or the model, that we have here to duplicate this in another community. If the pieces were to line up, that is certainly something that we would be interested in hearing about. If you can use the work and the time that went into just figuring out how to build a public building on leased land, and some of the other hurdles that they went through here, and take that knowledge and not reinvent the wheel and apply that somewhere else, I think that would be great. It would be one other benefit of what we’ve done here.

CI: With the outlook that your sister had, did the other members of your family have similar feelings for the environment, or has that really grown for you, for your father, and for your other siblings as this project has gone on?

AG: Well, I think that we all, in our own way, have an awareness or an understanding of sustainability issues, or the crisis that our environment is in, in different ways. For Laura, it was one area that she expressed in her day-to-day living. She went to school in Nanaimo, in British Columbia. She lived on a small island there called Gabriola. She just approached life sustainably, her own life. She shopped at the Value Village. She had a very green outlook. Maybe we didn’t all express that sentiment as strongly as she did, or as much as she did, but we felt that it was something that, in building a Foundation as something in tribute to her and my mother, it would be something forward-looking. When we sat down to think about how we would do this, or what we would do with the Foundation, there were all sorts of different ways that you could go, but ultimately we decided we wanted to have something that would have an impact, that was forward-looking, and not looking back. It was something to help pull us out of a sad period. To look to the future, and to look to youth, and to the things that resonated with Laura in environmental education and arts education – which is the other component of the Foundation’s direction – that’s how we wound up here.

CI: As a family, have you accomplished that goal of having this helping to pull all of you out of a sad period?

AG: I think so. I think the Foundation has certainly kept our family together. It’s given us a purpose and a focus outside of the usual family dynamic. It’s something that is of our family, but it’s also a project that keeps us looking beyond ourselves and to what we can do and how we can give back. In that way, I think it’s been good for us, and it’s been good for the communities that have benefited from the funding and will continue to benefit. It’s nice to be in a position to be able to honour family members in the way we’ve been able to.

CI: For the hockey fans out there, on the Gainey Foundation website there is mention of the support of the Montreal Canadiens. What form does that support take?

AG: Their support has been broad, and it’s been there from day one. Just of our family generally, the organization has been supportive and understanding. My office is at the Bell Centre, right next to my Dad’s. They’ve given me a place to work and to come, to get out of the house to be able to do this job not in my basement, but in a nice office! Certainly they helped us with our concert that we had in Montreal. We had a big benefit there. The Gillette Entertainment Group, that component of the Montreal Canadiens, was instrumental in putting that concert together that we had in June of last year. They made a sizable financial contribution too of a quarter of a million dollars to the Foundation. They matched my father’s commitment. So the support has come on every level. We’re very fortunate to have them in our corner.

Date of Interview: 11/02/2009
Location: Camp Kawartha Environment Centre, Peterborough, ON
Link: www.gaineyfoundation.com