OCAF Bids ‘Au Revoir’ to Founding Executive Director Steve Winkelman

It takes visionary leadership, deep subject specialty, and dogged, day in, day out determination to build a brand new charity from the ground up. And it doesn’t hurt to show up with a steady supply of dad jokes.

That’s just the shortest summary of what we learned from Steve Winkelman’s tenure as OCAF’s founding executive director.

From the time he joined us in 2021, to his departure in June to pursue new green resilience opportunities in Seattle, Steve was the relentless, dedicated presence that made OCAF a reality. His hard work and dedication enabled our board, staff, and a wide network of community partners to build something new and vibrant with our bare hands.

The reporting from OCAF’s original strategic planning process is a snapshot of a challenge facing every climate organization and every philanthropy every day: the potential for rapid progress is huge, but the need is urgent, and there’s an almost overwhelming urge to take on everything, everywhere, all at once. Coming out of the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, we recognized the need to restore momentum for local climate and energy solutions, while focusing in on the equity and affordability issues that COVID had brought to the surface.

As a new voice in town, a small charity with a huge mandate, we knew we could cover more ground faster by playing a convening role that brought organizations and sectors together in ways they may not have thought possible. Steve got that done by framing the issues widely and networking relentlessly, while dedicating himself to the seemingly endless management and operations tasks needed to establish OCAF as a stand-alone organization.

And it worked. From the legacy of trust coming out of our Ottawa Climate Equity Initiative, to the momentum for action after our Ottawa Climate-Economy Opportunities Summit last fall, it was so often Steve who imagined what was possible, inspired others to sign on, then built the solid foundations of support to move ideas into action.

So much of our mindset and a good part of our language around OCAF traces back to Steve’s sometimes wacky, always innovative and lateral thinking.

• Major program themes like Fill It First, Green Pipeline, Green Energy Resilience District and Reno-Protection as a counterpoint to reno- and demovictions, all meant to translate complex, nuanced thinking into compelling calls to action.
• His reminders that very few people can define “net-zero”, but everyone knows that they’ll want the power to stay on in the next storm or heat wave—and what they’ll lose if it doesn’t.
• His uniquely “Steve” observation that the innovative ice battery at the Cisco campus in the Kanata North Tech Park takes advantage of that most quintessential Canadian resource—cold.

That doesn’t even get us into the dad jokes. The genuine, abiding concern for the well-being of everyone in the OCAF community. Or the pointed and hilarious send-up of the Rocky Horror Picture Show theme that he created to energize and inspire one or our early board meetings. (You haven’t properly experienced the Rocky Horror theme if it wasn’t accompanied by global carbon and temperature charts.)

And there are no words to fully sum up the hundreds of hours Steve dedicated to the minute financial, institutional, operational, governance, legal, reporting and administrative details that go into setting up an independent charity. That tireless effort wasn’t visible to anyone who wasn’t watching closely. But it was still downright heroic, building the solid scaffolding on which everything else about OCAF depends.