Members

Kirsti M. McHenry

Biography

Kirsti has worked in diverse legal environments for the past 20+ years. She has used her wide-ranging experience to develop expertise in management, strategy, organizational development, and evaluation. She began her legal career at a national full-service law firm, clerked for the Court of Appeal for Ontario, and then obtained a graduate degree in law from the University of Michigan.

Kirsti worked for almost a decade at Legal Aid Ontario, running projects and managing teams to deliver on key corporate priorities. Her work included policy and research, stakeholder relations, financial modelling, acting as policy liaison for a significant IT build, training, workforce planning and modelling, evaluation, organizational development, and policy implementation.

She left LAO to take on a senior executive role at a nonprofit foundation, where she refined her management skills and gained significant expertise working with smaller organizations and seeing their challenges and opportunities. In this role, was a key driver in the development of diversity and inclusion plans and process improvements. She also developed and implemented a multi-year evaluation plan.

Kirsti taught human rights law at Queen’s University as a sessional professor and taught legal research as both a guest lecturer at the University of Toronto and as a sessional professor at Humber College.

In her spare time, Kirsti applied her skills to co-lead a team that worked extensively with the provincial government to draft and pass the All Families Are Equal Act. This legislation extended parental recognition to LGBTQ parents and made the laws of Ontario more inclusive. .

Most recently, Kirsti built Mathers McHenry & Co. and remains very involved in strategy, finance, operations, and organizational development.