Karel Mayrand

Karel Mayrand is CEO of the Trottier Family Foundation. He joined TFF after five years as President and CEO of the Foundation of Greater Montréal. Previously, he spent more than a decade as Director General for Quebec and the Atlantic at the David Suzuki Foundation and chaired Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project in Canada. He is also President of the board of Société du Parc Jean-Drapeau. Karel is the author of Lettre à un.e jeune écologiste (Kata editor, 2022) and Une Voix pour la Terre (Boréal, 2012), as well as co-author of Demain, le Québec (Éditions La Presse, 2018), and Ne renonçons à rien (Lux, 2017) with the Faut qu’on se parle collective. He frequently contributes columns and op eds for l’Actualité and La Presse.

Before joining the David Suzuki Foundation in 2008, Karel advised several UN agencies as well as Quebec’s former Premier, Pierre Marc Johnson, on globalization and sustainability issues, for over a decade.  He co-authored Governing Global Desertification (London, Ashgate Aldershot, 2006). He was co-founder in 2002 of Unisféra International Centre, a sustainability think-tank, where he created Planetair, a leading Canadian provider of carbon offsets and climate solutions. He is an Action Canada fellow (2005) and was finalist in 2008 for the Arista Prize as Social entrepreneur of the year in Quebec.