Bios
Board of Directors
Laurel Rothman
President
Laurel Rothman is the Director of Community Building and Social Reform at the Family Service Association of Toronto. Laurel also serves as the National Coordinator of Campaign 2000, a non-partisan national coalition of more than 90 organizations committed to securing the implementation of the 1989 federal all-party resolution "to seek to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000". Partners include a breadth of organizations, for example, Canadian Institute of Child Health, Canadian Teachers' Federation, Canadian Auto Workers, Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, Ontario Inter-faith Social Assistance Review Coalition, Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario and the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care.
Laurel brings 30 years of experience as a professional, volunteer, advocate and consumer in the community services field. She has worked in the voluntary sector, municipal and provincial governments, and the union movement in direct service, planning, policy development and advocacy. As (past) president of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care and Skills for Change, she broadened her knowledge about the diversity of Ontario's communities. From her thirteen years of work at the City of Toronto, she deepened her knowledge of and commitment to building and sustaining healthy communities.
Laurel is a frequent media spokesperson on issues of children's well-being. She also has published articles in professional journals and magazines including Child Welfare, Women and Environments and the Canadian Review of Social Policy.
Born in Ohio, Laurel completed her M.S.W. at the University of Pittsburgh and emigrated to Canada in 1971. She lives with her family in Toronto.
Michael Krashinsky
Vice-President
Professor Michael Krashinsky was born in Montreal, did his undergraduate work at M.I.T., and received his Ph.d. from Yale University in 1973. He then joined the faculty at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, and was promoted to Full Professor in 1989. He is currently Chair of Management at UTSC.
Professor Krashinsky specializes in applied microeconomics and in public finance. His research examines the ways in which economic theory can be brought to bear to understand government involvement in economic policy. He has written extensively on early childhood education and care, and is currently working on a project with Gord Cleveland looking at the effects of nonprofit and for-profit childcare in Canada.
Martha Friendly
Secretary-Treasurer
Martha Friendly is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Toronto and Co-ordinator of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit at U of T. CRRU is a policy research facility that specializes in early learning and child care. It maintains a circulating resource library, a comprehensive website, publishes a working paper series and other documents, engages in research, and takes an active role in ELCC policy development at the local, provincial and national levels.
Martha frequently writes on early learning and child care; recent publications include: Early childhood education and care in Canada 2004 (2005), Early learning and child care in Saskatchewan: Past, present and future (2005); Strengthening Canada’s social and economic foundations: Next steps for early learning and child care, in Policy Options (2004) and a chapter in Social determinants of health: Canadian perspectives (D. Raphael, (Ed.) 2004). Recently she was co-author of Canada’s Background Report on ECEC for the OECD (2004) and a member of the expert team for the OECD’s Review of ECEC in Austria.
She has been actively involved in advocating for progressive social policy for many years and works closely with a variety of community and advocacy groups as well as with government policy makers and other researchers, supporting a universal system of early learning and child care for all children.
Martha was born in New York City and educated in the USA, studying psychology in undergraduate and graduate programs. Before immigrating to Canada in 1971, she worked on one of the first evaluations of the American Head Start program. She has two grown children, both of whom attended community-based child care from an early age.
Staff
An Executive Director will be the core staff during the initial start-up phase. B2C2 will contract with professionals to provide advice and offer support to sites. Community facilitators will be contracted to the sites.
Susan Colley
Executive Director
Susan Colley has been involved in policy, advocacy and research concerning early childhood education and care since 1975. She played leadership roles in the establishment and subsequent activities of Action Day Care (1979), the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care (1982), and the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada (1983). She was awarded the YMCA Women of Distinction Award for Public Service in 1989 when she was recognized for her skills in leadership, partnership development and organizational capacity building. In the 90’s, Susan expanded her expertise as a senior manager in the fields of health and employment policy. More recently, Susan has worked with the Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto as Director of the Integration Network Project. Susan received her MBA from the Edinburgh School of Business.