Newmarket local Hilary Van Welter has trusted her gut helping causes around town.
From the Salvation Army to the Windfall Ecology Centre, Van Welter has spent decades helping different causes throughout the community. Each time she leaps to take on a cause, she said it is often a matter of a gut feeling.
“Every time I’ve gone into something, it’s because my gut is telling me there’s something new to be uncovered, to be discovered, to be opened,” she said. “It’s like a Christmas present. There’s something there ready to be unwrapped, and often it’s because there’s a radical need.”
A former government worker and current businesswoman, Van Welter has spent plenty of time leading causes, including the Canadian Breast Cancer Network, the National HIV Positive Women’s Community and more localized causes like Ladies of Lake, working to help Lake Simcoe. She also served on Newmarket’s Main Street revitalization steering committee.
Van Welter said she is motivated by seeing opportunities in bringing people together.
“I don’t think about, ‘Well, what’s the money? What’s the ask?’ I just think about what’s the opportunity to start moving in this, what’s the opportunity to start gathering people around this,” she said.
Van Welter has served on the boards of several organizations. She helped the Windfall Ecology Centre, a non-profit enterprise dedicated to supporting sustainable communities. She helped lead the creation of a course called Repower Ontario, meant to teach people about the green economy and how to potentially transition their careers.
“I fell in love with what they were doing,” she said. “What I loved about the work with them was we were looking at how do we move out of this idea of pure environmentalism … We ended up creating a really beautiful program.”
That work also led her to Ladies of the Lake, an organization of women working to protect Lake Simcoe.
They did “some of the most fascinating work in terms of how do we truly partner with nature,” Van Welter said. “How do we listen to nature? How do we tap into its wisdom … That’s an area that I have spent a lot of time in, bringing nature and people into a very different kind of conversation together.”
Those years of community work earned Van Welter one of the King Charles III Coronation Medals for Newmarket-Aurora.
“It was surreal,” she said, adding she found out while she was in bed with the flu and had a family member in hospital. “It was like a gift of light in an incredibly dark time.
“We all need to work towards having a best life,” she added. "And to do that we need to feel valued, and we need to value.”
