Uquutaq Society welcomes new executive director

It’s a time of growth and change at Uquutaq Society, an organization in Iqaluit that provides shelter and transitional housing services.

While several new projects are underway, including the construction of a new 44-bed low barrier shelter, its top leadership is going through its own transition.

“It’s been quite a tumultuous journey in the last five or almost six years because of the growth,” said Laurel McCorriston, Uquutaq’s outgoing executive director.

McCorriston is set to leave Iqaluit in a few months to be closer to her family down south.

“I think five years is really the maximum the executive director should be anywhere,” McCorriston said.

“I just feel like it’s good to have fresh eyes and fresh energy on a project,” she said.

“And I’m not getting any younger, so I think it’s time to take it a little bit easier than I have been in the last five or six years.”

McCorriston reflected on some of the challenges and successes over her years at the helm of Uquutaq.

In particular, the organization’s growth in properties and services has seen its annual operating budget increase to $4 million per year, up from $500,000 five years ago.

Uquutaq has hired Kevin Eaton as McCorriston’s successor.

Eaton comes to Iqaluit from a career working with Indigenous housing and homelessness in his home province of British Columbia.

He is a member of the Ahousaht First Nation, and describes himself as “helper by nature.”

“It was enticing to come up for the experience, enticing to come up for the adventure, enticing to come up for the need to serve a community that has, as I’m understanding as each day passes, a real dire need for support in shelters and transitional [housing],” Eaton said.

Eaton has only been working up north since the start of September, but he said he’s getting to know more about Uquutaq’s operations and Iqaluit as a whole.

He said he hopes to continue and build on the great work McCorriston and the team accomplished in her tenure.

McCorriston said she’s glad the hiring committee picked Eaton because of his experiences as an Indigenous person, but also, his successes at similar organizations on the west coast.

“We wanted somebody who was not a maintainer, somebody who has got a capacity and an interest and a hunger for doing growth,” McCorriston said.

McCorriston and Eaton are almost a month through a four-month transition period.

Eaton said he’s in “an absorbing mode” as McCorriston introduces him to Uquutaq’s partners and funders.

As McCorriston prepares to say goodbye to Uquutaq in a few months, she said she’s hopeful about the organization’s future, which she said will focus more on providing long-term housing.

“It’s been the most rewarding work I’ve ever done in my whole career, and I’m going to miss this place and the people,” she said.

Eaton said he’s excited to get to work and be welcomed to Iqaluit.

He’s also hoping to get his family to the community when the chance opens up.

“I feel privileged to be up here in this role, in this position, doing the work that’s definitely needed, and I’ve got the definite feeling that it’s going to be equally as rewarding or even more rewarding than the work that I’ve endeavoured back home in Vancouver,” Eaton said.