Overview 
Peter MacGibbon
Project Director, Local Employability Access Program, 3ci
Peter MacGibbon directs the LEAP program for the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation’s action-research project in Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick for Fostering an Entrepreneurial Culture for Lifelong Employability. He is responsible for managing all aspects of the project’s development and delivery in collaboration with regional community partners and local stakeholders.
As an innovator in the field of adult learning for the last 20 years and founder of the Quebec Learners’ Network, Peter’s work has focused primarily on the promotion of lifelong learning through distance education, multimedia content development, and project design and delivery services for projects in health and social services, agriculture, community consultation, and rural development. He sees the establishment of the LEAP program as a practical way to promote and stimulate entrepreneurial culture in rural and remote communities by supporting individuals in the goal-setting, planning, and pursuit of their own dreams
Shawn MacDonell
Lead Coach-LEAP, Founder Creativision Coaching and Consulting
Shawn MacDonell is the lead coach for the LEAP program at 3ci. Shawn actively challenges people to find their dreams and follow their dreams. For the last decade Shawn has been working mostly with youth and athletes, and that is why he was extremely excited to get involved with this program. The LEAP program would allow for personal growth in his coaching career. Shawn is a serial entrepreneur, and thus jumped at the idea of helping others become more entrepreneurial.
For the last four years, Shawn has been working with Creativision to help develop educational systems based on sport and theatre as the main platform. Creativision has really covered new ground in the educational world by allowing people to learn through their passions.
One thing Shawn knows for certain is that finding your passions in life is a precious thing. He has made it his personal mission to help people not only find their passions, but to put those passions into actions that can help in making a more fulfilling life.
Shawn’s personal motto for everything in life has been: "Practice like you are second and play like you are first."
Linda Stilborne
Curriculum-designer, Writer, Researcher
Linda Stilborne is a curriculum-designer, writer and researcher for the LEAP project. She has responsibility for planning and creating most of the learning modules for the project and for identifying existing resources that are relevant to participant's learning needs. On an ongoing basis, she continues to refine the learning modules and develop supplementary resources as needed.
Linda is an educator, learning technology consultant and a professional writer with a solid background in distance learning, web communications, and writing for new media. As a technology consultant, much of her work focuses on advising clients on the development and implementation of online learning environments. Her expertise includes how to shape and present content for online delivery, as well as how to use Internet communications tools for group interaction and student support. She is a published author of two guidebooks for using the Internet in education, writing, and research, and has developed training materials and delivered workshops for many educational and professional organizations, including Canada's SchoolNet, the Education Network of Ontario, Productivity Point International, the Canadian Editor’s Association, and a number of Canadian government departments.
Hugh Maynard
President, Qu'anglo Communications & Consulting
Hugh Maynard is involved in the research, analysis, consultation, network and organizational outreach aspects of LEAP, as well as assisting with project planning and implementation. Specific areas of activity include assistance with the design of project's remote-site facilitator training program, testing the project's delivery technologies, and creating an Asset Map that identifies and cross-references employability development / entrepreneurship support available to Quebec's English-speaking community.
Hugh has over 25 years experience working with technology and programs for at-a-distance communications and delivery of training materials for community and economic development programs in rural communities.
Fred Dixon
Fred is CEO of Blindside Networks, an Ottawa-based company that offers commercial support for BigBlueButton. For educational institutions that want to courses to remote students, BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system that provides students with real-time video, audio, slides, and chat. BigBlueButton originated at Carleton University and the software is accessible at BigBlueButton
.
In addition to providing access to webcasting services, Fred has set up the Moodle learning management system for the LEAP program, and provides technical advisory and planning services to the LEAP delivery team and participants.
Brenda Rooney
Brenda is a documentary producer, publicist, and public speaker on social justice, women’s issues and the new paradigm in international development. She was a core founder of the Wakefield Grannies, the first chapter of a now international movement of older women in developed countries supporting African grandmothers raising their AIDs-orphaned children. Her inspirational speeches have been given in universities and theatres from coast to coast. Her recent documentaries (produced with her partner Robert Rooney) include The Great Granny Revolution and Condoms, Fish & Circus Tricks.
Brenda is involved in the LEAP program as the lead consultant to the Rural Women’s Leadership project (delivered in partnership with the Quebec Community Groups Network), and has written several of the learning units in the LEAP module on Introduction to Community Development. She is also keenly interested in community theatre and it’s potential to contribute to local economic development, having been for many years a professional theatre publicist in Toronto.