Alison Loat
Co-Founder & Executive Director, Samara
Alison Loat
Alison is the co-founder and executive director of Samara, a charitable organization whose programs work to strengthen the Canadian democracy. Samara’s projects include the first-ever set of exit interviews with departing Members of Parliament and a series of seminars on public affairs reporting for Canada’s journalism community. More information is available at www.samaracanada.com.
She is also a fellow and instructor at the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto, and a regular writer and commentator on politics and democracy.
Prior to this, Alison was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company and the founder and the first executive director of Canada25, a non-partisan organization that involved Canadians in the development of public policy. She also worked the Privy Council Office in the Government of Canada and for the Medical and Related Sciences (MaRS) Discovery District in Toronto.
For her public service work, Alison was chosen as one of Canada’s Top 25 under 30 by Maclean’s magazine and received the Public Policy Forum’s Youth Leaders Award and the Queen’s Jubilee Gold Medal for her service to Canada. She is a political studies graduate from Queen’s University (BAH 1999) and has a graduate degree from the Harvard Kennedy School (MPP 2004), where she was the recipient of the Ellen Raphael Award for overall contribution by a graduating student.