Founder & Chief Strategist at Citizen Andrea
(she/her)

Andrea’s work is informed by three decades operating and governing complex public institutions — four terms in elected office in the City of Vancouver including serving as Vancouver’s first permanent Deputy Mayor, a decade on Metro Vancouver Regional District’s board, ten years as executive director of Canada’s largest membership-based environmental organization, and appointments to major infrastructure and financial governance boards including TransLink and the Green Municipal Fund. This experiences sits alongside her background as a community organizer and volunteer service on advisory bodies and community non-profit boards.

Before any of that, she learned about power as a young child in a lower middle-class household and subsequently as a street-involved youth. She learned early that understanding how systems work matters, and that while hard work is a given, hope without strategy doesn’t advance issues. Time and again she’s seen that even the most talented, committed leaders stall because they don’t understand how power actually works, and that gap is the opportunity for big change.

Since leaving elected office in 2018, she’s supported courageous leaders taking effective action on the biggest public policy challenges of our time through a number of concurrent pathways. It’s the evolution of work she’s always done: from wielding power on behalf of communities to teaching others how to build and use power themselves.