Corey is a passionate environmental enthusiast, speaking to anyone who will listen about real ways to change the world. As Managing Director of Summerhill Impact, his job is to work with the greatest group of people to ever enter the sustainability ring.

A featured speaker and motivator on several continents, Corey’s passion for the environment runs deep, first graduating from the University of Waterloo’s Environment and Resource Studies department, and working for a variety of environmental organizations. He first joined Summerhill in 2004 (when there were only 8 employees!), assuming numerous roles, and helping to initiate and oversee some of Summerhill’s most successful programs.

Corey is an avid sports fan, curious reader, rabid traveller, record collector and part-time rocker – but his greatest joy is teaching his 2 year old daughter how to hug trees.

Green is on Krista Friesen’s mind. She spends her days trying to stop mercury and old products from polluting our environment. She recently bought a new house backing onto Toronto’s Humber River, one of Toronto’s most beautiful green spaces. Day and night, thinking and living green. You see?

She oversees Summerhill Impact’s Switch Out program, a national program designed to remove and collect mercury switches from end-of-life vehicles. She’s also responsible for expanding Summerhill Impact’s Switch the Stat program, which exchanges old mercury-containing thermostats in residential and commercial buildings with more efficient and programmable new ones. So green!

Krista is an expert par excellence in Canadian stewardship issues. She researched, wrote and defended the only two successfully approved Industry Stewardship Plans (ISPs) to date under Ontario’s Waste Diversion Act. In addition to Switch Out and Switch the Stat, she’s been involved in the creation and delivery of a number of consumer-facing take-back campaigns for electronics and other residential waste. Krista has also authored or co-authored three reports that examine the options for phasing out, reducing and recycling mercury-containing products.

Krista’s green ethos has deep roots, graduating in 1997 from the University of Toronto with a degree in zoology, and has worked in the Canadian environment sector ever since. In her off time, she explores Toronto’s green spaces, and it’s been said that birds and animals can be seen trailing her excursions for the respect they have for her.

Bitten by a serious cannot-miss-it-in-your-hallway travel bug early on, Heather has travelled to about 30 countries. A lifetime of hiking up mountains, across deserts and around city corners has forever coloured her view of the myriad social and environmental challenges affecting communities everywhere. There is just so much work to be done! Putting her business degree to use, Heather specializes in the development of behavior change programming - through strategic planning, branding, positioning and partnership. A career in issues marketing has taken her across this fabulous country twice and landed her in Sub-Saharan Africa for many years. Memorable programs include raising support for women’s shelters in Canada; health education and human rights campaigns for Sesame Workshop; youth outreach and dialogue initiatives for the Nelson Mandela Foundation; re-branding "cool" condoms for USAID;  a certification program for locally sourced food; and, reducing the environmental wheel-print of transportation in Canada. She lives in Toronto with her two children - hoping to leave them a world to explore that is in better shape than when she found it.

Janet graduated from Queen’s University in 2007, with a dual degree in Geography and Psychology.  After her dream job of providing psychotherapy to old growth forests didn’t pan out, she joined the team at Summerhill in the hopes of using her understanding of people and the world to make a difference for the environment.

Janet’s career at Summerhill has closely resembled a Canadian version of the song “I’ve Been Everywhere” because she’s delivered various types of programs- from energy-saving to pollution-prevention, for various diverse sectors- from government to private enterprise,  in a number of different regions across Canada -from Victoria to Iqaluit and most cities in between. 

In 2010 Janet initiated Stakeholders for Solutions, a project that brought together contacts from three levels of government, NGOs, the recycling industry and northern communities in order to discuss actionable solutions to waste management challenges in Canada’s North.  This initiative had several positive outcomes including kicking-off Summerhill’s northward expansion of national programs such as Switch Out, as well as Summerhill’s True North vision, which aims to restore the pristine condition of our northern environments while affecting positive social change. 

Proud that Summerhill is quickly emerging as a leader in bringing environmental programs to all Canadians, not just those skirting the Southern border, Janet is confident that she’s chosen the right career path, although telling pine trees that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar is quite amusing.

Originally from Huntsville, ON, Rebecca grew up in wilderness, clean air and fresh water. She was a regular competitor and occasional champion in typical cottage-country sports (sailing, canoeing, wood-splitting, etc). Also a bit of a bookworm, she combined her interests in literature and wilderness by studying both English and Ecology at the University of Guelph. After this, she moved to Sudbury to learn more about Science Communication at Laurentian University and Science North.

Since arriving in Toronto, Rebecca has had fun and challenging work opportunities that have included the Ontario Science Centre (Recreational Programs) and Pollution Probe (Research and Project Management). She has also volunteered with Let’s Talk Science’s online science magazine “Curo-city” (Section Manager) and the City of Toronto’s Community Stewardship Program (Steward). Now the manager of Car Heaven (and previously of Retire Your Ride) at Summerhill Impact, Rebecca doesn’t know which part of her job she likes more – helping Canadians responsibly recycle their vehicles or crushing old cars.

Caroline was born and raised in Brampton, Ontario but did her best to escape the city any chance she could get.  After spending a few summers working in the provincial parks system (which she loved!) and two months working as a tree planter (which she loved somewhat less) she decided to turn her love of the outdoors into a career.  She headed to the University of Waterloo to complete a degree in Environment and Resource Studies and squeezed in four co-op terms and a semester abroad in Western Australia while she was at it. 

After graduation, Caroline accepted a job at the OETC – an organization that administered Ontario’s water and wastewater operator certification program on behalf of the Ministry of Environment.  The Walkerton crisis underscored our need for safe, clean drinking water, and Caroline ensured that operators met the education and experience requirements for licensing.  She was also involved in the implementation of an online database, and got a chance to try her hand at IT consulting after being offered a job with Clytan Inc.  Caroline learned a lot while working as a Project Coordinator and Business Analyst, but really started to miss the environmental sector.  After taking some time off to hike the Camino de Santiago (an 800 km trail across northwest Spain) Caroline was lucky enough to join Summerhill Impact where she works on the Switch Out mercury switch recovery program.

Jennifer Court was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and raised mostly in Quispamsis, New Brunswick, with strong ties to Tracadie Bay, PEI. So, despite having spent more than a decade in Toronto, she considers herself to be a Maritimes girl at heart: she’s an expert at starting campfires and digging for soft shelled clams.

Jennifer’s curious and creative mind first lead her to Toronto to study industrial design at the Ontario College of Art & Design, where she attained a Bachelors of Design. This program piqued her interest in the amount of time people spend in built environments, interacting with human-made objects; this interest lead her to York University where she completed a Masters of Environmental Studies, focusing on sustainability and innovation in industrial design and a concurrent Graduate Diploma in Sustainable Business from the Schulich School of Business

Jennifer believes in solving problems through interdisciplinary collaboration, and this belief has been reflected in her work experience. She was formerly a Researcher at the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, a Consultant and Marketing Coordinator at York Sustainable Enterprise Consultants, has taught English and writing skills at OCAD, York, and George Brown College. Most recently Jennifer was the Student Success Specialist for the School of Design at GBC.

Jennifer’s first program with Summerhill Impact was Health Canada’s Hazardcheck, an education program about indoor air quality. She has recently joined “team mercury,” working on the Switch the ‘Stat program.