Donna Kennedy-Glans

Ms. Kennedy-Glans, LL.B is a lawyer and businesswoman, with 25 years of practical experience guiding organizations in their management of integrity dilemmas, at head office and on the ground in 30+ jurisdictions. She was the first female Vice President at Nexen Inc., a large Canadian-based energy company.

After stepping off the corporate ladder in 2001, she founded Integrity Bridges Inc. – sharing expertise, training, and practical tools to enhance the capacity of management teams in organizations to navigate integrity dilemmas. Management tools include tested processes and tools introduced in *Corporate Integrity: A Toolkit for Managing beyond Compliance (Wiley, 2005), which she co-authored.

Acting on the invitation of female leaders and host governments in places like Yemen, Egypt, Oman, Sudan, India, and Nepal, she founded Bridges Social Development in 2003, a volunteer organization and registered charity that trains and mentors female (and male) community leaders in health care, law, journalism, education, and politics in these countries. A youth entrepreneurship initiative is being launched in 2009.

Her book Unveiling the Breath: One woman’s journey into understanding Islam and gender equality (Pari Publishing, September 2009), is a narrative non-fiction book that examines the dilemmas of gender harmonization in a globalizing world that she has observed firsthand through her “for profit” and humanitarian work in the workplace, within communities, even inside families.

Unveiling the Breath is inclusive, incorporating East-West perspectives; faith and feminism; male and female points of view. The complex matter of raising sons is addressed, as well as the thorny question of how to reconcile spirituality and patriarchy. This book is written by a non-Muslim female from the West who has seen gender dilemmas in both the East and the West, up close and personal, and sees more similarities than differences.

Her husband and her have three sons and reside in Calgary.