Alison Lawton: The Connector

Image by: Adam Blasberg

Like any stay-at-home mom, Alison Lawton schedules her day around her kids. She drops her two children off at elementary school in the morning, and picks them up at the end of the day. She’s even a volunteer crossing guard. But where she differs from other soccer moms, even in tony West Vancouver, is in the A-list celebrities she includes among her close personal acquaintances: she has held private one-on-ones with the likes of Bill Clinton, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Nelson Mandela and even the Dalai Lama.

At the age of 39, Lawton has reached the pinnacle of not just one but two careers. Her first is in finance, where she co-founded a dot-com incubator during the boom of the late ‘90s. The second is as a philanthropist and social activist, where she produced an award-winning documentary film about child exploitation in Uganda’s bloody civil war. And along the way, she would marry, then separate from, mining magnate turned film mogul Frank Giustra.

A native of Montreal, Lawton completed a communications degree at Concordia University, then headed west for adventure in the early ’90s. “I was an anglophone, trapped in Quebec with an English last name,” she explains as we settle into a booth at the Park Royal Caffè Artigiano for our interview. “I wanted to do something different and didn’t want to go to Toronto.”

Thanks to the influence of her mother, a nurse, Lawton had spent a lot of time volunteering at hospitals and soup kitchens as a kid, so it was only natural that she would turn to the non-profit sector when looking for work in Vancouver. A communications contract with an environmental company led her to the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. That, in turn, would lead her to a meeting that would mark the first about-face in her career.

Lawton was raising funds for Earth Day International when she approached David Richardson, at the time president of Investor First Financial Inc., a Vancouver investment firm. “He said, ‘If you can raise money for a non-profit, you can raise money for profit. You should come work with my firm,’ ” Lawton recalls.

The timing of the invitation was perfect. Lawton was having second thoughts about her fundraising work; in particular, she was frustrated by conditions donors would attach to their contributions – conditions that often put the donors’ interests ahead of the cause they were supporting.

Richardson, who came from the Winnipeg family behind venerable Canadian investment firm James Richardson and Sons Ltd., offered Lawton a glimpse into the world of independent wealth – and that world suggested new possibilities. “I thought eventually I’ll be able to invest my money in social change, in a way that wouldn’t necessarily be tied to the outcomes that worked for the donor but for the cause,” she recalls. “I can’t say it was that calculated at the time, but I knew something wasn’t working, and I was pushing to find what would work.”

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