30 years as a volunteer made this artist an order of Collingwood recipient

A local lover of the arts has donated his time over the years to helping local causes, and last month his efforts were recognized.

For this week’s edition of People of Collingwood we sat down with Ron MacRae, one of this year’s Order of Collingwood recipients.

Q: How long have you lived in Collingwood?

A: 30 years.

We moved our young family here from Toronto in 1989.

Q: Where did you go to school?

A: I graduated from the university of Manitoba with an honours degree in Fine Art.

I later studied graphic design at what was then called the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.

Q: Are you retired? What did/do you do as a career?

A: I have been a self-employed graphic designer in Collingwood from the year we arrived here. My design work has been almost exclusively with local businesses and organizations.

Q: Can you please outline your volunteer efforts, and your role within those efforts.

Over the past 30 years I have volunteered in a number of different areas. I was a coach and board member of the youth soccer league for many years where I held several different portfolios including referee development and board president.

My abiding interest in the visual arts and photography also lead me to initiate, with colleagues, the inaugural Juried Photo Show for the Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts.

Later, independently, we developed the Gallery in a Suitcase project staging contemporary art exhibitions in empty downtown storefronts. They were plentiful in the ’90s!

Typical tasks involved securing donated spaces from landlords, curating artists works, writing grant applications, bringing on sponsors and creating publicity. A few years later, I helped develop a similar, Visiting Artists series of exhibitions with Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts.

I was also a member of town council’s Arts Advisory Committee for several years.

For the past 18 years, I have also been an active volunteer with the local Taoist Tai Chi Society, a non-profit charity dedicated to helping people maintain their health through the practice of Tai Chi, and more recently, I have become a volunteer with the Curling Club of Collingwood.

In 2016, I joined the Collingwood Syrian Sponsorship Committee to help settle Syrian refugee families in Collingwood. Our group has settled three families of newcomers who have since been joined by five other Syrian and Iraqi families. They are gratefully flourishing in their adopted country and community, working hard and raising their families like the rest of us.

Q: What made you choose to lend your time to these causes in particular? Why are they important to you?

Helping children to socialize and grow healthy through youth soccer taught me a lot about the value of giving and sharing life skills.

In the arts, I feel that their development is critical to a creative, vibrant society and economy and I have always found helping to build or develop community-based organization fulfilling and worthwhile. The strength of our community fabric attests to those volunteer efforts from many people.

The greatest reward as a volunteer is the wonderful people I continue to meet and the deep, lasting friendships that we forge along the way.

Q: How did you learn you had been chosen as a recipient for the Order of Collingwood?

A: I received a letter informing me of my receiving the honour. I knew nothing of it prior.

Q: How did you feel when you heard you had been chosen?

A: I would say shock over surprise.

As a rule, we don’t sit around self-evaluating 30 years of volunteer contribution. It’s only after some reflection that all of these parts of one’s past are brought back to life, the pieces begin to fall into place, and one’s nomination starts to make some sense.

Q: What does the future hold for you?

A: I don’t live too far in the future. I am still involved with a number of the same volunteer groups mentioned and there may be others that come along.

I enjoy my work, my family and friends – and travel occasionally, and we are privileged to live in a wonderfully rich area of the country and in a great community.

For our feature People of Collingwood, we’ll be speaking with interesting people who are either from or are contributing to the Collingwood community in some way, letting them tell their own stories in their own words. This feature will run on CollingwoodToday every Saturday. If you’d like to nominate or suggest someone to be featured in People of Collingwood, email [email protected].