Outstanding Contribution Award – 2023
Recipient: Meg Thompson, UVic
Meg has been an active member of ACE-WIL for the past four years, always going above and beyond to contribute to the Co-op and Work-Integrated Learning community.
As the Chair of the Professional Development (PD) Committee, Meg routinely demonstrates leadership, often making difficult decisions and navigating situations with great discretion, clarity, and professionalism. The leadership she models is one that includes collaboration and innovation. For example, Meg led conversations with the Committee about how to increase the accessibility of PD events. With Meg’s willingness to try to new things, but to do so with a clear plan and intention in place, the PD Committee tried “viewing parties” for the first time. She is flexible and embraces whichever path will provide the most benefit to the ACE-WIL community, even if this creates more work for her. Meg is steadfast, inclusive, and inspiring in her approach to leading the PD Committee.
Meg was also part of the ACE-WIL Conference Program Committee, through which she contributed significantly to an engaging, fun, and enriching conference experience for organizers, presenters, and participants. She has put in place a very efficient system of organizing the Program Committee processes, and she is always open for input and improvement of how to improve how the committee functions.
Beyond her contributions to ACE-WIL, Meg contributes significantly to the field of WIL as a whole. In her role at UVic she develops relevant, engaging, and supportive curriculum and supports colleagues in these endeavours as well. She is generous and humble in sharing her knowledge. She has contributed to the development and implementation of impactful programs such as UVic’s CanWork program which supports UVic students who identify as having a disability or mental health challenges to engage in meaningful, paid, degree-related work experience during their degrees.