Rotary President Elect Loida Lumanlan with Tammy Wiebe
This week we welcomed Tammy Wiebe to tell us a few things about herself. Tammy is the Executive Director of the Valley Zoo Fund Development Society. Her rotary classification is Fund Development. Tammy told us that she came to Rotary through Dennis and Donna Hutton as Dennis has served on the Valley Zoo Fund Development board. She came to know Donna when she approached her about our club sponsoring the zebras. Tammy said she has been a member of our club for one year now.
Tammy told us that she was raised in Red Deer by a single mum in a family of five children and is herself a single mum with three grown children and three grandchildren. She said that she worked for many years in marketing for various large law firms around Alberta. More recently, once her children were grown and gone, she became interested in giving back to the community and volunteered for the Valley Zoo board. She soon realized that she really enjoyed the work there and found that her business background was a valuable addition to their board. Gradually she became President of the board, where she served for two years and started hiring people with more professional backgrounds for the Zoo. A few years later she decided to take a pay cut, leave marketing and become the Executive Director for the Valley Zoo Fund Development Society. She found that it was a steep learning curve working for a charity board but she truly enjoys her work and has not looked back since. She has been at the zoo for twelve years now and said that doing something you are truly passionate about makes all the difference.
Her latest endeavor at the Zoo has been fundraising and building a new wolf habitat that will open later this year. Another one of her projects has been ‘Pay it Forward for the Planet’, where the zoo subsidizes the cost for classrooms of children from poor areas to visit the Zoo when they make a commitment to take on a conservancy project. The Zoo has now sponsored over eight hundred students under this program.
We would like to thank Tammy for telling us a few things about herself and look forward to getting to know her better in future.