Name: Michael Shapcott

Position: Director, Affordable Housing and Social Innovation at the Wellesley Institute.

Notoriety: are they known locally (i.e. by everyone in your neighbourhood, school, bus route?); regionally (i.e. in all or most of the city or certain community in the city (i.e. all students, all people of a certain ethnicity) would know this person; nationally? internationally?

Profile:

Michael Shapcott is Director of Community Engagement at the Wellesley Institute, an independent non-profit research and policy institute working to advance health equity through community-based research, community engagement, social innovation and policy development.

Previously, Michael was a Research Associate with the Centre for Urban and Community Studies where he co-ordinated the Community / University Research Partnerships unit.

He is recognized as one of Canada's leading housing policy experts, and is a long-time housing and homelessness advocate. He is the co-editor, with Dr. David Hulchanski, of Finding Room: Policy Options for a Canadian Rental Housing Strategy, the most definitive study on national housing issues.

He has written chapters for books on health, housing, poverty and urban issues. He has worked at the local, provincial, national and international levels on both governmental and non-governmental initiatives.

For almost a decade, he was Manager of Government Relations and Communications , Ontario Region for the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada.

From 1990 to 1993, he was coordinator of the Rupert Pilot Project, an innovative community development project to provide housing and services for 525 rooming house tenants. Previously, he was a community worker with homeless adults at the Toronto Christian Resource Centre.

Mr. Shapcott spent ten years as a journalist, working as a reporter, columnist, and editor at several newspapers. He continues to produce popular education and research materials on housing and homelessness issues and contribute opinion pieces for national and local media.

He is a keynote speaker for local, provincial, national and international audiences on housing, homelessness, poverty, environment, urban and social justice issues.

He attended the Faculty of General Studies at the University of Calgary and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, where he completed the Intensive Programme in Poverty Law at Parkdale Community Legal Services, specializing in landlord and tenant law.