WRITER - Vancouver Lifestyles -
Faye Wightman
FAYE WIGHTMAN
PRESIDENT & CEO, VANCOUVER FOUNDATION
She gives and she gets
She was just one of those kids – School President, head of the Girl Guides, President of the Red Cross Club. And it all came from her parents. They were her best role models.
“Creston was just one of those wonderful small communities – you volunteered. My folks tell me, “You would always bring home the stray dogs.””
Was your family particularly religious?
“Not really. In fact, we went to Sunday school and we were convinced it was only so our folks could have sex. Ha!”
In the forty years that I’ve known the Vancouver Foundation, it has had only two men at the helm. Faye Wightman is the first and only woman to be President and CEO of what is one of North America’s largest granting organizations. With a capital resource around $674 Million, the Foundation hands out awards, gifts, prizes and encouragements approaching $35 Million a year to people and groups working in health, science, the arts, families and children.
Long before she was the recipient of 2004 Business in Vancouver’s Influential Women In Business Award, Faye was a nurse in the open-heart unit at New Westminster’s Royal Columbian Hospital. Then, she took on the daunting task of maintaining half a dozen out-post hospitals in rural B.C. for the Red Cross. Many of these locations were accessible only by floatplane.
“We started child abuse programs in some of these places. You have to raise money and I discovered that I really enjoyed doing that.”
“I really do believe passionately in every cause I’ve championed. I want to share the story with that person in front of me. I want you to get involved. Yes, it can be frustrating. Yes, there can be gamesmanship. Yes, some people have the capacity to give or to give more. If they say, “No,” I just feel I haven’t explained the situation well enough!”
Relentlessness is a part of it. Sometimes it means you don’t have friends. On the rare occasions when Faye Wightman has taken a break, her mother says, “Good. Now you’ll have friends again.”
How good is she at raising money?
For 14 years, Faye was the president of the B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation. She built a 650% increase in revenues. She was awarded the Marketer of the Year award from the B.C. chapter of the American Marketing Association. Most recently at the University of Victoria, she re-organized the university’s development office and managed to find a new $38 Million in two years.
In high School in the Kottenays, she played basketball, volleyball, ran track and played in the band. Today, she plays tennis and golf, lives part-time at the theatre and the opera and reads voraciously.
“I’ve got books on the dining room table, at the bedside, everywhere. In Turkey, I ran out of the 5 books I’d brought with me.”
She is celebrating the birth of her first granddaughter and boasts that her seafood, chicken, pork and everything-else paella is the best in town.
If we’re lucky, we all have one of those moments. Mine came last June 6th when the cardiologist said, “We’re sending you by ambulance to VHG.” Huh?
Faye Wightman’s came when she was 29. Her husband, a physician, committed suicide.
“It became very clear. Life is short. What are you going to do? I had two children. I learned in the open-heart unit that it doesn’t matter who you think you are. The poor and the rich side by side. I saw enough death and I saw enough people coming back from death. You simply decide how you’re going to behave.”
In the first week of October, the Vancouver Foundation published a kind of scorecard for Vancouver as a social identity. “Vital Signs” was a snapshot of Vancouver as a liveable city, and while we were given high marks for diversity and liveability, we failed the grade with a big red “D” in the areas of homelessness and the gap between the rich and the poor. The Vancouver Sun was quick to editorialize that the Foundation’s methodologies left something lacking and the we were really better than all that. But the truth of the Foundation’s conclusions is available to anyone with a quick stroll downtown day or night.
“Our society needs to be responsible. When we see a woman carrying all her worldly belongings in a shopping cart, we have to ask ourselves what kind of society is it that allows all of one’s possessions to be in a shopping cart.”
What are the best qualities you see in people these days? The worst?
“The most hopeful quality I see is compassion. I’m seeing more and more people stepping up and asking, “What can I do to help?” The worst is when people are highly judgemental.”
How can we make giving a more integral part of our lives?
“It comes from the home and from the schools. We have to learn at an early age that it is ultimately in my best interest to share with others. Giving, whether in service or in dollars, is central to human nature and crucial to a civilized society.”
