Meet the Team

Wayne Orr has a background in finance and helps us manage our money.

I bring 14 years of experience in nonprofit and social enterprise marketing and communications, including event management and PR. My career has taken me from Toronto to London to Shanghai to Belfast, focusing social impact, particularly in disability services. Now that I’ve settled in Calgary, I’m excited to contribute my skills to fostering an age-positive culture through this incredible festival. As the Community Relations Chair, I focus on building connections between the festival and the wider community, helping to amplify our message and engage new audiences. It’s a privilege to be part of a team that uses film to shift perceptions on aging and celebrate life’s later stages through art. I am also excited to contribute my skills in accessibility advising for both physical and digital spaces to ensure our message reaches and includes as many people as possible!

I have just completed two years as chair of the Older Adults Advisory Table of the City of Calgary’s Age Friendly Calgary initiative. · I also have completed two years on the Steering Committee for Age Friendly Calgary. · I have just completed a series of Webinars for Unison aimed to stimulate and inspire older adults to be active. · I am continuing with a monthly creative writing series for Unison which aims to get older adults to write their life stories. · I am currently on a small task force, which is a joint venture of Calgary Seniors Resource Society (CSRS), Carya, and the U of C’s Centre on Ageing, to create a mapping of all seniors organised activities and services together with an innovative application for access by the digitally illiterate and those with a poor command of the English language. · I am a Facilitator with the Calgary Association of Lifelong Learners (CALL) in both Science & Environment and the Special Programs section. What drives me? Three years ago, my wife died of a heart attack, but she was also suffering from Alzheimer’s. That ended five years as a full-time caregiver. I felt driven to live life to the full and give back to the world of older adults some of the wisdom that I had picked up along the way. My first initiative was to bring about a ‘Love-In’ between the Punjabi community of the Northeast and Silver Springs Community of the Northwest. It was a great success with hugs and tears between very disparate people. I tried an initiative of bringing compassion and understanding through the performing arts to deliver plays in six different seniors’ facilities across Calgary. I arrived in Calgary in 1964, lured by a partnership offer in a consulting engineering company. I had a hand in much of the infrastructure of Calgary. My skill set changed over the years, through Project Management, Litigation Support, Business Management, to finally, Risk Management in the oil patch. On retirement, my wife and I bought a run-down sailboat in the Netherlands, did it up, and spent the next 14 years sailing the Eastern Atlantic from Portugal to Norway, from St. Petersburgh to the West of Ireland. It was not really retirement at all for we sailed for six months, left the boat wherever we were, and came back to Calgary for 6 months to do risk analysis for oilsands plants. It came to an end when my wife’s onset of Alzheimer’s meant that she could not manage any more.