Director:
F. Harry Cummings, Ph.D., R.P.P .
Harry Cummings has Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Geography from Clark University and a B.A. Honours from Western. He is a Registered Professional Planner and a member of the Canadian Evaluation Society. His experience includes international rural development and project management of large interdisciplinary rural development projects. In Canadian and international contexts he has also worked on rural-urban issues including migration, land use and regional planning. His urban planning experience includes water conservation, retail planning, transportation planning, industrial planning, economic and financial analysis and zoning and severance issues. He has experience in Canada , USA , Poland , Ethiopia , Malawi all of Southeast Asia , India , Nepal Turkey, Portugal and Panama . His specialty areas include economic impact assessment, evaluation, economic impact of agriculture, survey and research methods. He has managed over 75 major consulting projects with budgets as high as $40 million and as many as 40 staff.
Harry is a full professor at the School of Rural Planning and Development at the University of Guelph . He has supervised over 120 graduate students and teaches graduate courses in Regional Economics, Program Evaluation, Community Economic Development and Research Methods, He is an active community member and has served on the boards of many community organizations. Harry is fluent in French and Indonesian.
Dr. Cummings heads a core team of multi-disciplinary consultants:
Don Murray, B.A., M.Sc.
Don has a Masters Degree in Rural Planning and Development from the University of Guelph and a Diploma in Agriculture from the Ontario Agricultural College. His specialty areas include economic impact assessment, community needs assessment, program evaluation, survey design and implementation, and data analysis. Don has extensive experience in the economic assessment and strategic planning field where he has worked with a variety of community interest groups and industry sector stakeholders. He is very familiar socio-economic measures and has expertise in working with Statistics Canada data. Don also designs and implements formative and summative evaluations and is a member of the Canadian Evaluation Society.
Don has a long and diverse work history in the agriculture sector. Don managed a 200-acre dairy farm for ten years and spent several years in New Zeaand and Australia as a crop and herd technician. Since 1998, Don has worked with HCA on over 15 economic impact studies across Ontario that examined the direct, indirect and induced impacts of the agriculture and aquaculture industry on local communities.
Don volunteered as board member with the Guelph and District Multicultural Centre (an immigrant settlement service agency) between 1997 and 2008 where he worked with other community stakeholders in developing initiatives and activities for enhancing the capacity of newcomers to more fully participate in all aspects of Canadian society.
Susan Healey, Ph.D.
Susan has a Ph.D. in Rural Studies from the University of Guelph, an M.A. in Planning from the University of Waterloo, and a B.A. (Hons.) in Geography from McMaster University. She is an experienced planner, researcher, and policy analyst and has worked with municipal governments and non-government organizations in Canada and Latin America. Dr. Healey's expertise is in qualitative and quantitative research methods, urban revitalization, community policing, rural migration, poverty alleviation, sustainable development, land reform and peasant movements. She has coordinated and conducted evaluation workshops and program evaluations for diverse organizations ranging from municipal police services and regional health units, to NGOs, farmers unions and indigenous communities. Susan is fluent in Spanish, volunteers in her community and is a member of the Canadian Association for Studies in International Development (CASID) and the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC).
Hubert Paulmer, M.Sc. (Ag), MBA, GDIP
Hubert has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and a Masters in Agriculture from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in India. He also completed a Post-graduate Diploma in International Development and Rural Planning from University of Guelph. He is a Professional Agrologist in Ontario and an active member of the Canadian Evaluation Society and the American Evaluation Association. He began his career as a banker, financing agricultural and rural projects and managing micro-credit schemes. He later moved to the agri-food and commodity sector and has extensive experience in strategic planning, market linkages, international trade, project management, supply-chain management, managing and developing SMEs, results-based management, stakeholder and client relationship management, capacity building, partnership development, evaluation and government liaison in various continents.
Hubert has experience in the Middle-East and South Asia, West Africa, Central Africa, South Africa and Western Europe besides Canada. He has been involved in financial and economic studies of various projects. As an evaluator he has experience in developing and implementing evaluation plans, institutional assessment, developing research tools and conducting interviews, focus groups and surveys in various sectors. He was a member for two years in the UNICEF’s committee in Nigeria for Vitamin A fortification.
At HCA, Hubert has been involved in the labour market study in Huron and Perth counties; review of quality assurance program for College of Veterinarians; health needs and services research project in East Wellington; and the economic impact study of aquaculture in Northern Ontario. He was a member of the Institutional Assessment and Policy Analysis mission of HCA in Srilanka for the CIDA funded water and sanitation project. He also led evaluation / baseline study assignments in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka and Zambia.
Hubert has presented papers comparing evaluation guidelines and log-frames of bilateral, multilaterals, foundations and international NGOs
Alain Cummings, Dip.
Alain has a diploma from Conestoga College in the field of Recreation and Leisure Services. Alain brings a lot of energy to the environment. He places a strong emphasis on productivity and getting the work completed properly the first time. Alain's work experience focuses on his recreational background. He approaches any new project with excitement and innovation. He is quite comfortable with most office tools including; Word, Excel, Power Point Presentations, and SPSS as well as others. Alain is happy to evaluate all quantitative data that comes his way, be it through telephone questionnaires or the most recent Census data.
Alain has completed a community-based survey identifying the needs of the Landsdowne community in order to serve them most effectively with a new Community Centre. He has also participated in the evaluation of the delivery of a recreation based quality assurance program to post-secondary students, known as HIGH FIVE. Alain has also had the opportunity to develop spreadsheets in order to effectively interpret outputs from several different projects including Cancer Care Ontario 's “Five to Ten a Day Program” and the Ontario College of Pharmacists' Quality Assurance Program.
Alain is currently completing a Degree in Child Youth and Family, as a Bachelor of Applied Science program at the University of Guelph.
Sarah Megens
Sarah is completing her Master’s degree in rural planning and development and holds an Honours Bachelor’s degree in international development and political science, both from the University of Guelph, and a post-graduate diploma in public relations from Mohawk College. In addition to her expertise in public relations and communications, Sarah has an extensive background in agriculture and local food issues, having been born and raised on a medium sized diversified farm in Perth County, in addition to spending two years managing a local food project in Hamilton, Ontario before returning to Guelph for her Master’s degree. Sarah has over eight years of experience working with not-for-profit and non-governmental organizations with positions ranging from executive committee member, project manager, fund development officer and communications officer, as well as a host of voluntary positions in Guelph and Hamilton. In 2010, Sarah was awarded the Nuffield Canada Farming Scholarship to study the relationship between local food systems and farmland preservation regimes around the world. Sarah has enjoyed success in her public relations and communications career, and is an accomplished grant writer and fundraiser. She has also earned appointments on two official sub-committees for Hamilton City Council—the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Advisory Committee and the Hamilton Community Food Security Committee, was a co-founding member of Slow Food Hamilton, and currently serves as an advisory committee member of the Guelph Local Food Initiative.
Jeremy Cummings , B.Sc.
Jeremy is a graduate from the University of Guelph Computer Science Program. He has worked with and is an expert in a half-dozen different programming languages, and is the current web-master for this site. He uses software engineering methodologies for all important endeavors. Some of the technologies he used for this site's development include HTML, JavaScript, Cookies and Photoshop. He has also used Shockwave technology to bring abstract concepts to easily understandable reality. Jeremy has set up an office network for HCA, and he has also helped in several of HCA's surveys, in surveying and helping with the data analysis. Jeremy is bilingual in French and English. Jeremy is taking HCA into the 21st century with cutting edge web-design, and loves implementing and researching the best technologies.
Working with people is something that Jeremy also loves to do. He has worked with people extensively in a variety of positions, including sales and marketing as well as technical support, and is sensitive to all user concerns and issues.
Fredrick D. Ashbury , Ph.D.
Frederick is the president of PICEPS Consultants. Inc. He holds a PhD in Sociology from York University. He has 17 years experience in behavioural research and program evaluation in health and education. He has held senior positions in research and program evaluation in the following organizations: PAE Research, Workers' Compensation Board of Ontario, National Cancer Institute of Canada, and OpTx Corporation. Dr Ashbury has expertise in many areas of research design, including clinical trials, case-control studies, survey research, and qualitative research studies (including focus groups, key informant interviews, personal interviews, participation observations). His research interests include health promotion planning and evaluation, professional education, physician behaviour change and patient quality of life. Dr Ashbury consults to government, not-for-profit and private sectors, in Canada, the US, Germany, the UK and Australia. He holds academic appointments at the University of Toronto and McGill University, and he lectures on health promotion, research methods, and program evaluation. Dr Ashbury has received funding from leading granting agencies, and published and presented more than 65 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, scientific abstracts, book chapters and public documents. He sits on the National Medical Advisory Board of CAREpath Inc., the Research Advisory Board of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit, and the board of directors of the Canadian Association of Psychosocial Oncology. Dr Ashbury is a member of numerous professional organizations based in the US, Canada and Europe.
Douglas C. Obright , B.Sc.
Douglas has a Masters degree in Geography from Queen's University and a certificate in Project Cost Management from Ryerson Polytechnical University. He is a full member of the Ontario Professional Planners Institute and the Canadian Institute of Planners. He began his career in the real estate industry and followed that with a series of planning positions with the Ontario Government. From his work with the province, he gained extensive experience in development approvals, policy development, program evaluation, regulatory and legislation revisions and land-related information. He has undertaken numerous socio-economic-environmental studies and is familiar with a broad spectrum of socio-economic measures. He is highly creative and draws on his extensive planning background to develop realistic approaches to specific challenges. Douglas is results oriented and particularly enjoys working with clients to clearly define their overall goal, the initiatives needed to achieve that goal and the specifics, which need to be acted upon.
In his spare time, Douglas serves on the Don Watershed Regeneration Council - a group responsible for advising
the Toronto Region Conservation Authority and for pursuing initiatives, which will improve the quality of life, particularly the natural environment, within the Don River Watershed.
