Award Recipients: 2019
Every year, Algonquin College celebrates the incredible achievements of its alumni through the Alumni of Distinction Awards. These awards honour the extraordinary contributions our graduates make to the community while achieving career success. Here are the 2019 recipients:
Alumnus of the Year: Ricardo Larrivée
Chef, Owner and Founder, Ricardo Cuisine
Television Broadcasting – Class of 1990
No one in Canada better represents the appeal of family life around the dinner table than Ricardo Larrivée. Known internationally simply as Ricardo, he and his wife, nutritionist Brigitte Coutu, have created a media and retail empire devoted to the appeal of simple and nutritious meals. His television shows have been broadcast in more than 150 countries, and his cookbooks – nine in French and five in English, with total sales of more than 700,000 copies — have all been best-sellers. Ricardo is a Member of the Ordre national du Québec and a Member of the Order of Canada.
Read Ricardo’s Bio
Apprenticeship: Paul Brisson
President, Cantwell Air
Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Systems Mechanic – Class of 2011
Paul Brisson is passionate about everything to do with heating and air conditioning: the range of products available, the problems that can occur with their mechanisms and finding solutions. He loves it all so much, in fact, he bought a company. Today Brisson is president of Cantwell Air Conditioning in Ottawa, and an advocate for his trade, for customer service, and for young people entering apprenticeship programs. As a businessman and as an apprentice-intake interviewer for the Ontario College of Trades, he is playing a valuable role in advancing the success of a new generation of skilled tradespeople.
Read Paul’s Bio
Business: Luc Villeneuve
President, Benchmark Corp.
Business Administration – Class of 1979
Canadian businessman Luc Villeneuve has spent more than 25 years boosting sales and assuming leadership roles with major companies, including Sun Microsystems, GE Capital, NCR, McAfee Canada, Red Hat Canada and Benchmark. He has also taken a leading role in national discussions about diversity and inclusion in IT. “Gender equality is a critical economic and social issue,” he wrote in the Globe and Mail in 2017, and he increased the number of qualified women hired by his companies. He was a finalist for the Microsoft INSPIRE2018 Women in Technology Man of WIT Award, which celebrates men supporting diversity and inclusion.
Read Luc’s Bio
Changing Lives: Ryan Armitage
Manager and Trainer, Soloway Jewish Community Centre
Fitness and Health Promotion – Class of 2007
Ryan Armitage is nationally known for his expertise and leadership in fitness and health promotion for clients with special needs. As Fitness Centre Manager at Ottawa’s Soloway Jewish Community Centre, he oversees personal training and conducts classes for many clients. But it is his work with people who are recovering from health crises or dealing with the impacts of aging or mental and physical disabilities that has earned him acclaim in his profession and in the media.
Read Ryan’s Bio
Community Services: Mark Marsolais-Nahwegahbow
Founder, Birch Bark Coffee Company
Correctional Worker – Class of 1993
Mark Marsolais-Nahwegahbow is founder of the Ottawa-based Birch Bark Coffee Company, a firm that sets aside a portion of its sales proceeds toward the purchase of certified water purifiers for Indigenous families in Canada. He has also spent years striving to raise the effectiveness of aboriginal justice programs as a native justice coordinator, a residential school crisis intervention counsellor and as founder of IndiGenius & Associates, a justice consulting firm that to date has written over 200 Gladue Reports, which tell the life stories of Indigenous people in court for bail or sentencing hearings.
Read Mark’s Bio
Creative Arts & Design: Ben Ing
Head Chef, Noma
Culinary Management – Class of 2008
After years of honing his craft in Ottawa’s best restaurants and leading establishments in New York City and Melbourne, Australia, Canadian chef Benjamin Ing is thriving as head chef at Copenhagen’s celebrated Noma, which has been named Best Restaurant in the World five times by Restaurant magazine. Ing takes pride in leading the restaurant’s team of chefs and their award-winning explorations of Scandinavian cuisine, and ensuring that Noma is, in his words, “the best place to work, the best environment, has the best people and pays the best.”
Read Ben’s Bio
Health Sciences: Jennifer Kryworuchko
Associate Professor, School of Nursing – The University of British Columbia
Registered Nurse, Critical Care – Class of 1996
Jennifer Kryworuchko devoted much of her work as a nursing researcher to studying the organization and delivery of health care services to optimize patient and family involvement in health decision making and to improve access to palliative care. Her community-engaged scholarship — intended to influence practical changes in policy, system design and care delivery — has been focused on ensuring that seriously ill individuals, with their families and medical team, are engaged in shared decision-making about the end-of-life care they desire.
The Algonquin College community is saddened to announce Jennifer’s passing. Our condolences are being sent to her family. We encourage you to read the in memoriam message published by the College.
Read Jennifer’s Bio
Recent Graduate: Naomi Fong
Athlete, Team Canada
Social Service Worker – Class of 2018
Naomi Fong has been working toward a career and stable health in the years since the former Bombardier emerged from the Canadian Armed Forces with PTSD. She found hope and community at the Pembroke campus of Algonquin College, where she entered Social Service Worker program and graduated with honours. This helped give her the confidence to join the 2018 Invictus Games in Sydney, Australia, where she won two bronze medals in Women’s Road Cycling and was the Team Canada flag bearer at the opening ceremonies.
Read Naomi’s Bio
Rena Bowen Volunteer of the Year: Monica Elaine Campbell
Co-leader, Ottawa Deaf Palliative Care Team
Palliative Care Multidisciplinary Program – Class of 2005
Monica Elaine Campbell has been a leader in advancing culturally appropriate care, including palliative care, for the Culturally Deaf, hard of hearing and deafened communities in Ottawa and nationally. As a volunteer, she has tutored Deaf and hearing students in math and science, taught Deaf women with low literacy skills how to prepare meals at the Deaf Kitchen Club; helped establish the Ottawa Deaf Health Care Team; and successfully advocated for the opening of a dedicated floor for Deaf seniors at the Glebe Centre. For her dedication to the community, she was awarded the Order of Ontario in 2016.
Read Monica Elaine’s Bio
Technology: Grant Lecky
Co-founder Security Partners’ Forum
Security Management – Class of 2007
“Security is everyone’s responsibility,” says Grant Lecky, the security and resilience expert hailed as a “global visionary” on the cover of the April/May 2019 issue of Sovereign Magazine. Lecky has certainly made it his responsibility in a career that has earned him honours and accolades for his leadership and innovation. He is founder of the Security Partners’ Forum, an agile network of the global security community dedicated to building security and resilience capacity internationally. A Global Advisory Council member of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management, he is also a security and resilience professional with the Government of Canada.
Read Grant’s Bio
Alumni Employer of the Year: MindBridge Ai
Ottawa-based MindBridge Ai is transforming a growing number of industries by using artificial intelligence to analyze and identify risk across vast sums of business data. Its cloud-based Ai Auditor platform is used by accounting firms around the world, including over 40 of the US Top 100. The platform helps companies identify and understand anomalies across 100 per cent of their data using a combination of advanced AI and machine-learning techniques. Chief executive officer Eli Fathi leads a growing team of over 100 employees, including several alumni of Algonquin College, across a variety of business, engineering, and sales disciplines.