The Casey Awards 2009
| Watch video tributes to these recipients at www.youtube.com/caseyhousetv |
JIM SHEA  A passionate facilitator, visionary and artist, Jim Shea was one of the tireless volunteers behind the creation of Casey House. Whether through his paid work or extensive volunteerism in the fields of health care and social justice, Shea’s distinctly likeable and facilitative approach helped to advance the work of many AIDS, health care and social justice organizations throughout Ontario. He died suddenly in 2004, at the age of 43. |
RICHARD BURZYNSKI  Richard Burzynski has for more than 20 years been a pioneering leader in advocating for a community-based response to AIDS in Canada and worldwide. An organizer of the first Canadian AIDS Conference in Montreal in 1985, he served as the Canadian AIDS Society’s first Executive Director, working with other community leaders in successfully lobbying for Canada's first National AIDS Strategy. As founding Executive Director of the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations (ICASO), Burzynski passionately advocated for resources to developing countries and for progressive international policy, leading ICASO for 17 years until 2008. In 2001 he was selected by his international peers to speak on behalf of NGO’s worldwide at the UN Special Session on HIV/AIDS, at which the General Assembly approved its landmark Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS. Burzynski has played an important role in the creation of the Global Fund Against AIDS, TB and Malaria, and is a frequent advisor to UNAIDS. |
DR. JANE PHILPOTT  In the 1980's Dr. Jane Philpott travelled with her young family to Niger, a country devastated by HIV/AIDS. For nearly a decade Dr. Philpott practiced medicine there, training village health workers—most of them women—in the provision of community health care. Now a family physician at Markham Stouffville Hospital, Dr. Philpott will be the founding Program Director of the hospital’s new Family Medicine residency program through the University of Toronto, with a longitudinal focus on global health. Dr. Philpott is also part of a delegation from the University of Toronto partnering with Addis Ababa University for postgraduate medical education in Ethiopia. In 2004 Dr. Philpott founded Give a Day, a fundraising campaign that has raised $2 million to date by encouraging donors to give one day's pay on World AIDS Day, in support of international AIDS relief agencies. |