Board of Directors

George Brown is a lawyer, urbanist and Integral Associate Coach. He is Principal of Integral North. Prior to this, George spent nine years as President of the Ottawa Community Loan Fund, (OCLF) as well as 9 years as a City and Regional Councillor in Ottawa. As a Councillor, he served as Chair of the City’s Economic Affairs Committee and the Region’s Environmental Services Committee. He has a Master’s of Science Degree in Community Economic Development from New Hampshire College’s Graduate School of Business (now Southern New Hampshire University) and an LL.B. degree from the University of Ottawa Law School. He was called to the Bar in Ontario in September, 2003. George is a Part-Time Professor at the University of Ottawa Law School. He is Chair of United Way Ottawa’s Community Impact Cabinet and a Member of it’s Board of Directors.

Duff Conacher, LLB/JD and PhD in Law, is an internationally recognized leader in the area of democratic reform and government accountability. He is a former Ralph Nader’s Raider and he has worked as a researcher, community organizer and educator, legal intern and consultant. A graduate of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, he has a long-standing interest in democratic process and corporate responsibility issues. He was the main founder of Democracy Watch in 1993 and has led the organization since then to win more than 160 changes to federal and provincial laws (more changes than any other organization in Canada). He was the Coordinator from 2011 to 2013 of the national educational charity Your Canada, Your Constitution (YCYC). He was an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law from 2011 to 2014 and a Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa's School of Political Studies from 2014 to 2016, and was then a Part-time Professor at the University of Ottawa's School of Political Studies, and the Faculty of Law during the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years. As a PhD student at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, he was awarded a Vanier Canada Scholarship by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in 2018, and a Bertram Scholarship by the Canadian Foundation for Governance Research (CFGR) in 2017.

He also heads the firm GoodOrg.ca Consulting which provides advice and services to governments, businesses and citizen organizations in the areas of good governance, ethics, responsibility, communications, stakeholder and public relations. His past work includes organizing the first chapter of Quebec PIRG (Quebec Public Interest Research Group) at McGill University in 1988, serving as a member of the Board of Directors of University of Toronto and Ontario PIRG from 1988 to 1991, and playing a key support role in organizing PIRG chapters at four other universities in Quebec, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Alberta between 1988 and 2002. He is is also co-author, with Ralph Nader and Nadia Milleron, of Canada firsts: Ralph Nader’s Salute to Canada and Canadian Achievement which spent six months on Canadian best-seller lists in 1993 and was the #1 best-seller for five weeks, and author of the best-selling More Canada Firsts: Another Collection of Canadian Firsts and Foremosts in the World (1999).

David Shulman is the Coordinator of DEN has written and spoken extensively on citizen participation and citizenship education in Canada and the United States. He has worked with governments, foundations and school boards on the planning, delivery and evaluation of citizen participation programs for youth and adults. He is the former president of the Ontario Community Education Association, and in 1993 became the founding Coordinator of the Democracy Education Network. Among his other responsibilities, he is a social studies, civics and communications teacher for for various school and church programs in Toronto.