Meet Our Team

Anita retired as a partner with Grant Thornton LLP in 2017 after a career spanning almost 34 years, including over 15 years in senior leadership and management roles and where she negotiated several successful mergers. As a client service practitioner, she provided audit, assurance and business advisory services to a variety of clients that ranged from small, entrepreneurial, growth-oriented owner-managed businesses, to multinational organizations. She developed a large real estate practice over the years which she transitioned to others, and she grew and embraced a significant and high profile charity and not-for-profit practice towards the end of her public accounting career. In addition to financial and reporting requirements, Anita has also advised clients on governance, structure, control and sustainability matters.

Anita has held a number of Board and Advisory roles with various organizations over the years including the Toronto and Region Board of Trade, Sick Kids Hospital Foundation, the Aphasia Institute, and the University of Toronto, and she was a founding member of the Grant Thornton Foundation. She completed terms as Treasurer, Vice Chair and most recently Chair of the Board of CPA Ontario, which serves 90,000 chartered professional accountants and 20,000 CPA students in Ontario.

Malcolm is a philanthropic advisor who has worked with charities and donors since 1990.

He is Head, Philanthropic Advisory Services at Scotia Wealth Management and founder/head of Aqueduct Foundation, a public foundation with donor advised funds based in Vancouver.

He is a member of CAGP’s Government Relations Committee, Director of The Muttart Foundation, and member of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Indigenous and Canadian Curatorial Committee. Previously, he was a member of the CRA Charities Directorate’s Technical Issues Working Group, director of CAGP, and board member of the Canadian and Barcelona sections of MSF/Doctor’s Without Borders. He is an active writer, teacher and public policy volunteer in the charitable and social impact sector.

Since 2014, Sonya has been a program Director with the Dhillon School of Business and teaches in the accounting faculty. She has been recognized with three teaching awards and has been appointed a University of Lethbridge Teaching Fellow for 2023 – 2025.

Prior to joining the Dhillon School of Business, Sonya was an accomplished accounting and assurance professional with a specialization in internal audit leadership. She published several articles in professional journals and was a frequent speaker at conferences across North America. In 2012, Sonya was recognized with an Early Achievement Award, by CPA Alberta.

Over her career she has occupied several different seats at the board table, including eight years as a direct report. Sonya currently serves on the boards of CPA Alberta and Legal Aid Alberta and is an appointed public member on the Audit Committee for a local school division.

In addition to her CPA, CA designation, Sonya holds the ICD.D and CIA designations, as well as certifications in risk management and internal controls.

Ashu is a Partner with Grant Thornton LLP in their Business Consulting and Technology practice. Over the past 20 years, Ashu has held senior management positions leading Product and Sales teams with the goal of helping organizations grow their revenue through the development and execution of innovative sales strategies. Ashu’s journey has taken him through assignments in Product Development & Management, Marketing, Sales Operations, Direct Sales and Management Consulting. At Grant Thornton Ashu’s key responsibilities are the development and execution of business transformation initiatives for clients in key areas such as technology, revenue growth and operational optimization.

Matthew Choi co-founded CanadaHelps along with his friends Aaron Pereira and Ryan Little. He has remained actively involved in the organization since its inception, continuously serving on the Board of Directors or Advisory Council for over 20 years. He and his co-founders have been recognized as the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Special Citation for Social Entrepreneurship.

Matthew currently practices academic and clinical medicine as an Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at McMaster University, focusing on pediatric reconstruction and craniofacial surgery.

Matthew obtained his MD from Queen’s University and his MPH from Harvard University.

Shawn is a seasoned executive with experience in scaling industry disruptors through cycles of hypergrowth. During his time in New York, Shawn led enterprise adoption for Amazon Web Services helping the world’s largest organizations move to the cloud. Returning to Canada, Shawn went on to found AWS Canada Inc. and built out the Canadian business and data centers.

Before working in the cloud, Shawn’s time on Wall St. led him to found New York’s High-Performance Computing User Group. This eventually brought him to Royal Bank of Canada where he was chief architect for Canada’s largest financial institution.

Shawn has returned to his hometown of Ottawa to found the AWS Solutions Global AI Hub and found their global AI business. It’s here Shawn was introduced to Shopify where he ran engineering for multiple businesses including the Amazon Buy With Prime partnership.

Throughout his career, Shawn has worked with several global non-profits including CancerResearchUK, UN Global Pulse, and UNICEF to accelerate their impact and further the public good. Shawn has worked with the Ottawa Food Bank and volunteers as a children’s coach for basketball, baseball, and hockey. Shawn was recognized as Ottawa Business Journal’s 40 under 40 for his impact on Ottawa’s economy and community.

Karim Harji works with investors and ventures to describe, measure, and improve their social impact. He is the Programme Director of the Oxford Impact Measurement Programme at the Said Business School, University of Oxford; and Managing Director at Evalysis, an impact measurement and advisory firm. He was previously a co-founder and Director at Purpose Capital (now Rally Assets).

Kathryn Hume is the Vice President of Digital Channels Technology at the Royal Bank of Canada. She has led multiple technology teams at RBC, including the personal investments development team and the Borealis AI machine learning team. Prior to joining RBC, Kathryn held leadership positions at Integrate.ai and Fast Forward Labs, where she helped over 50 Fortune 500 organizations develop and implement AI programs. She is a widely respected author and educator on technology and innovation, with work appearing at TED, HBR, the Globe and Mail, Harvard, MIT, the University of Toronto and more.

She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and speaks seven languages.

Leen is the Chief Executive Officer at Wealthsimple Foundation, a charity with the mission to enable a brighter future for everyone in Canada through access to post-secondary education. Previously Leen was the Chief Financial Officer at Wealthsimple, a leading financial technology company on a mission to help everyone achieve financial freedom by providing products and advice that are accessible and affordable.

Previously, Leen was part of the founding team and led finance and operations at Influitive, a marketing technology startup in Toronto. Prior to Influitive, Leen held a number of positions at HSBC Canada, Eloqua (acquired by Oracle in 2012) and China Construction Bank.

Leen is actively involved in the community and has a passion for education, healthcare, technology, and advocating for women and people of colour. She sits on the board of the George Brown College Foundation, and the advisory board of MoveTheDial and Medchart.

Leen holds an MBA in Finance from Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University.

Lawrence Mandel is a Director of Engineering at Shopify.

Lawrence specializes in building and running high performing and globally distributed software development teams. His career has spanned IBM enterprise technology to consumer technology such as Firefox. He has been active with not-for-profit, open source technology organizations including Mozilla, the Eclipse Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation.

Lawrence volunteers as a coach for youth hockey and baseball with the North Toronto sports organizations, he mentors at the University of Toronto, and he has chaired events and fund-raised for The Canadian Shaare Zedek Hospital Foundation.

Lawrence was recognized with an Arbour Award for outstanding volunteer contributions to the University of Toronto and with a Volunteer Recognition Award from the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. He is the author of Eclipse Web Tools Platform: Developing Java Web Applications and holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Western University.

Gert is a Partner in the Deloitte Digital practice where he helps public sector organizations to enable lasting business change through digital transformation. He has over 24 years of experience in the technology environment and brings insights on best practices gained assisting global organizations with complex technology and digital initiatives. He has co-authored a number of governance best practice frameworks as they relate to technology including ISACA’s Taking Governance Forward, RiskIT and COBIT5 frameworks.

He has six years of experience as a Director on not-for-profit Boards.

Gert has obtained his Master’s in Engineering with a specialization in Technology Management from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. He holds the ICD.D certification and has also completed the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) Innovation Governance Program Level 1.