Helen Cooper

Helen graduated from Queen’s with a B.Sc. in Chemistry and Mathematics, then worked for a year as a chemist at Procter & Gamble in Hamilton. With a yearning to see a wider world she signed up with CUSO for a two-year stint teaching in a girls’ boarding school in northern Tanzania. She then completed an M.Sc. at the London School of Economics in Econometrics. Upon her return to Kingston with two young children she was elected as a municipal councillor in 1980. She served as Kingston’s first woman mayor from 1988 to 1993, then began a three-year term as Chair of the Ontario Municipal Board. In the early ‘90s Helen served as President of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario as well as a member of the Premier’s Council on Health Strategy and the Ontario Round Table on Environment and Economy. From 2001 to 2006 she was a member of the Advisory Council of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization. Since 2006 Helen has been a manager within the Ministry of Community and Social Services, mostly recently with program delivery for adult developmental services until her retirement at the end of 2014. She has subsequently indulged in a great deal of travel both in North America and abroad and is also pursuing a long-held goal of completing Route 66 in stages. Her current volunteer enthusiasms are the Queen’s School of Policy Studies where she is a Distinguished Fellow and Oasis Senior Supportive Living where she recently became president.