Look how her garden’s grown

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This article was published 25/05/2022 (1224 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 2008, Assiniboine Park was in trouble.

The zoo was teetering on the brink of closure. The Conservatory was nearing the end of its life. Every part of the park, it seemed, was in some form of disrepair. There was no Journey to Churchill, no promise of polar bears swimming overhead. The Leaf — the multi-functional horticultural attraction currently under construction — was a far-off dream.

The herculean task of not just rehabilitating Assiniboine Park but transforming it into a financially viable hub to be enjoyed for generations to come was the driving force behind the creation of the Assiniboine Park Conservancy in 2008 — a not-for-profit organization working arms-length from the City of Winnipeg, responsible for day-to-day operations of the park and zoo and also ensuring its survival.

And Margaret Redmond, the founding president and CEO of the conservancy, was tasked with not only leading this brand-new organization in realizing that vision, but also winning over the hearts and minds of a community who didn’t always see that vision right away.

The Assiniboine Park that Redmond inherited is not the one she will leave behind. After 14 years, she will step down after the opening of The Leaf at the end of this year.

“We’ve come to the end of what was really the beginning for me and the beginning for the conservancy,” Redmond says from the APC board room. It’s a stunning weekday morning in May and, beyond the office walls, the park is thrumming with the energy of joggers and dog-walkers and groups of mothers with babies on blankets.

“It just seemed like a time to reflect on, am I here for the next 10 years? Or is this the time for me to say, I did what I came to do, and it’s time to turn that over to the next person’s great ideas and energies. And for me, personally, it just seemed like a time to explore new chapters in my life.”

Redmond, 59, was exploring a new chapter when she first accepted the job at APC. She had just come off of 16 years with the Canadian Wheat Board, and had taken a two-year hiatus when her second daughter was born.

The role at APC was a perfect fit, even if it didn’t seem that way at first. Redmond is a lawyer by background — she holds a bachelor of laws as well as bachelor of arts from the University of Manitoba — with experience in strategic planning, government relations, marketing, and fundraising. The fact she’s a fourth-generation Winnipegger doesn’t hurt.

Most importantly, though, she could see what Assiniboine Park could be. What it should be.

“I just remember walking into the first meeting with a headhunter and saying — and this was kind of bold but — ‘You don’t know this, but I was actually meant for this job,’” she recalls with a laugh. “I just had such a feeling of certainty.”

Those early days were a mix of excitement and terror, she says. It required the courage to be bold and imagine what the park could be like at its best.

“And you had to help other people imagine what it could be, and ask them to participate with you,” Redmond says. “We started deliberately, with the smallest projects, like the expansion of the duck pond, the nature playground, and won people’s trust.

“I think there was a lot of fear that this arm’s-length organization was going to come in and really commercialize the space. We had people saying it would be an amusement park. I remember there was a rumour that we were going to put a drive-thru Tim Hortons in.”

But the APC’s focus has, from the beginning, been on stewardship.

“We’ve been given the privilege, in my mind, of looking after these beautiful spaces and these beautiful species in our care — but we should never forget that we’re doing that on behalf of our community,” Redmond says.

“You have to always be careful about that balance between making sure that these spaces are available for our whole community, also realizing that if we lose sight of being financially responsible, we run the risk of the park and the zoo returning to those earlier days where they they couldn’t be sustained.”

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Assiniboine Park has always been part of Redmond’s life. Growing up, she lived not far away, and remembers relishing finally being old enough to ride her bike on the monkey trails and buy a bag of chips at the Pavilion.

In Grade 5, her family moved even closer. “Then it literally became my backyard,” she says. “I spent hours in this space.

“I went to Laidlaw and Shaftesbury High School and this is where our track team trained, and this is where we’d come when we skipped school. And I have to say, I probably took it for granted.”

Before she began in her current role, she did research into other parks and urban spaces and came to see how unusual it is to have an urban space like Assiniboine Park, and how lucky we are to have it. “That just really underlined for me, how can we let this go to waste? How can we let it deteriorate and not look after it in the way that was intended all along? I think about that a lot: how do we make sure we never take it for granted again?”

In 2009, the APC unveiled its 10-year, three-phase redevelopment plan. Phase 1 focused on improvements in the heart of the park, such as to the Duck Pond. The second phase focused on modernizing the Assiniboine Park Zoo with the opening of the award-winning Journey to Churchill exhibit in 2014 and the establishment of the Leatherdale International Polar Bear Conservation Centre in 2012. The third phase will be capped by the opening of The Leaf, which replaces the old conservatory, demolished in 2018. The Gardens at the Leaf opened to the public in 2021.

The construction of The Leaf, again, involved asking the community for their trust. Winnipeggers felt very strongly about the old conservatory, a popular refuge in a Winnipeg winter. The APC envisioned a space that would allow people to celebrate diversity through biodiversity, and be able to host environmental and cultural education programs.

“Although the old conservatory was a lovely building, it was really not capable of playing that role in our community,” Redmond says. “I can’t wait till people are able to enjoy this building. I still gasp when I walk in that building — it is so beautiful, it is so inspiring. And to picture people able to walk in there on a cold January day, and be in this incredible oasis, and learn something and enjoy each other’s company, this is a project that will be enjoyed by generations.”

Redmond credits her APC staff, the park’s volunteers — “Six hundred people have said, ‘This is important enough to me to donate my time,’” she marvels — and its board of directors for taking these ideas from dreams to realities. “That is a huge piece of the success story here. Huge. I’m so grateful to them.”

While there’s plenty to be personally proud of, Redmond says Assiniboine Park is a community success story.

“All we did was share a dream, and a vision to save this place — this beautiful place,” she says. “And it really took a whole bunch of other people and their energies and their generosity and their ideas and their skills. That’s what makes it the most amazing story of all, and, I hope, an inspiration to whatever the next problem our city or province needs to tackle. There’s something in that story that I hope inspires people to really dream big and go for it.”

A national search for Redmond’s successor is underway and will be overseen by the board of directors. Redmond is not retiring, per se, but after decades of fitting her life around her career, she’s looking forward to a change of pace in which she fits her career around her life.

“I hope that a year from now or so — OK, maybe a year and a half from now — you’ll see me doing something else involved in making our city better.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @JenZoratti