The Quarterly
Winners of the Jane Jacobs Prize:
Rollo Myers and Iria Vieira
The Jane Jacobs Prize was created to discover and celebrate Toronto’s
original, unsung heroes by seeking out citizens who are engaged in
activities that contribute to the city’s vitality. The prize recognizes
the ideas and impact of ordinary individuals and is named in honour of the
long-time Toronto resident and renowned author. Every year the prize
highlights the contribution of one or two Toronto residents and promotes
how their ideas and insight help us better understand our city.
The Jane Jacobs Prize was announced in 1997 at the end of the five-day
international celebration called “Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter.”
Hundreds of the world’s most prominent thinkers and community leaders
attended the Toronto event to exchange ideas and celebrate Jacobs’ work in
the areas of cities, economies and values. At the event’s closing
ceremony, Ideas That Matter chairman Alan Broadbent announced that an award
would be created to build on the spirit of the gathering.
Potential recipients of the Jane Jacobs Prize are identified through an
extensive, diverse network of spotters who are asked to anonymously
nominate candidates. Each candidate must: live and work in Toronto; be
active in the community in some exemplary way; be an unsung hero who is not
particularly well known; and be making a contribution that provides a model
for others.
A committee comprised of Ideas That Matter advisory members makes the
final selection. Each recipient of the Jane Jacobs Prize receives $5,000
each year for three years to spend in any way he or she chooses. In
addition to the cash award, each recipient is invited to meet twice yearly
with Jane Jacobs and previous prize recipients to discuss their experiences
and knowledge of what makes the city work.
The 2000 Jane Jacobs Prizewinners
For as long as he’s lived in Toronto, Rollo Myers has been dedicated to
the appreciation and preservation of this city’s heritage. He really is an
unsung hero who is about to get sung. Rollo is a fascinating character.
When I first met him, more than twenty-five years ago, he had already
invented and built a technological way of reproducing maps and graphics and
producing three-dimensional maps and models of almost anything. As I
remember, one of the models he produced was the size of a gymnasium; it
represented an entire country. If you go down to the new City Hall, you
will see a scale model of virtually the entire city. That is Rollo’s
creation.
With his background in engineering and architecture, he knows how to do
things. I have never met anyone who knew how to do as many things as Rollo
does. He once showed me how to take a 1940 photograph of a car parked
beside a fence and figure out how high the fence was and exactly where it
was. That’s not an easy task to do from a single photograph. I don’t know
how many hours Rollo spent on it, but he did it. For those of you who have
such a photograph, you might want to keep Rollo in mind.
Rollo Myers is a man of action. A man of enthusiasm. A man of energy. He
is always doing things, always thinking and always talking–usually all at
the same time. Rollo also reacts. When, as a founding member of Friends of
Fort York, he learned there was a major development being proposed which
would tower huge buildings over the Fort, Rollo immediately built a model
which clearly demonstrated to everybody that this was a fiasco. He headed
off the development because nobody had realized how really awful it was
going to be. Rollo did. Rollo reacted. And Rollo produced graphic evidence
of what was being proposed.
He is a current member of ten other heritage groups and is consistently
involved in the preservation of the city’s heritage. Recently Rollo
identified the exact location of the original Parliament Buildings of Upper
Canada, from the 1790s. This is a site of obvious significance–not only
provincial, but also national. Rollo has been lobbying and writing articles
and doing graphics and everything else he can think of to try and bring
recognition to the fact that the site of the first Parliament Buildings
should be preserved in the public domain.
Another current focus is the Walks and Gardens Project where Rollo is
trying to get an 1857 statute intended to bring parkland to the Toronto
waterfront enforced. He is working on it like mad. I think he must be
getting somewhere because he’s got the city’s legal department tied up in
knots.
Rollo is not bureaucratic, power hungry, glory seeking, doctrinaire,
process oriented, cowed by authorities, aloof or dull. With his feet firmly
planted in the past and the present, Rollo Myers is doing a hell of a lot
for the future of Toronto. I am so delighted to see him linked with Jane
Jacobs, who has also done so much for this city. I think Rollo certainly
deserves the Jane Jacobs Prize.
Congratulations.
George Rust D’Eye, Partner, Weir and Foulds, former Solicitor, Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto
Iria Vieira has always been ahead of her time. At eighteen, she traveled
alone from her home in the Azores to the mainland for her post-secondary
education. From there, she went to England to work for two years as an au
pair and to practice her English. She returned to Portugal to conclude her
degree at the University of Lisbon and immigrated to Toronto as a young,
single woman in 1964.
As a new immigrant living in Kensington Market, Iria was drawn to the
white house on Wells Avenue, the original site of St. Christopher House [a
community centre in downtown Toronto]. She went in to ask for help settling
into her new city, and she ended up as a volunteer. That began Iria’s long
connection and commitment to St. Chris.
Working with Iria for the last twelve years–starting with the project
for Portuguese older women at Portuguese Social Services, and continuing
today at St. Christopher House–has been exciting, fun, and yes, a
challenge for me.
Iria is a master at dismantling myths and has been a great role model
for many women. From leaving home early to forge a new life for herself, to
today, working with as many organizations as she can, Iria has helped
redefine the role of women–particularly immigrant women–encouraging them
to participate freely and actively in the life of our city. Iria never
stops. Her mind works overtime. And when she loves something, she doesn’t
walk, she runs. And we have to run with her. The phone lines are busy all
the time, making sure we are on schedule and we don’t forget anything. She
checks and she re-checks.
Iria is enthusiastic, passionate and very eclectic. Pro-fessionally, she
has worked as a social worker for thirty years, working with children with
special needs. As a volunteer, she sits on boards and advisory committees;
she is an interpreter and escort for seniors and families going to medical
appointments; she is a friendly visitor and a peer supporter for seniors
suffering from abuse; and she is a great actor in our skits for the
prevention of elder abuse.
Iria is co-founder and president of the group, Portuguese Women 55 Plus.
She is involved in the Out of the Cold program, feeding the homeless. She
loves organizing events with her peers and will advocate with other social
groups on seniors’ issues. Everything Iria does, she does with the same
enthusiasm and gusto that she demonstrates when she is telling or listening
to a good joke, or watching the World Cup of Soccer, or cheering her
beloved Maple Leafs. From Iria, I have learned so much, both as a
professional and as a person. She is truly unique and it is my great
pleasure to congratulate her on winning the Jane Jacobs Prize.
Odete Nascimento, Incentre Coordinator, St Christopher’s
House
Reflections on the Jane Jacobs Prizewinners
by Jane Jacobs
I never would have guessed until it happened how splendid it is to have
a prize named after me. It enables me to be thanked for awards I didn’t
provide by delightful people that I don’t have to feel guilty about
because I didn’t pick them out. The best thing about it is that I get to
know these remarkable people. The combination of the prizewinners from last
year–Mary Lou Morgan and Dan Yashinsky–and the two from this year–Iria
Vieira and Rollo Myers–gives us a good example. And with these four, I can
be daring enough to make a few generalizations.
The first generalization is that people who do remarkably interesting
things happen also to be remarkably interesting people. Now which way cause
and effect runs, I don’t know. Do the things they do make them interesting
or does the fact that they are interesting make what they do so good and
interesting?
The second generalization is that these people are not interchangeable
cogs. This has been obvious to everyone; it has been mentioned several
times: Iria is unique, Rollo is unique, Mary Lou is unique and Dan is
unique. You couldn’t set out any kind of resume or list of qualifications
for such people. They invent what they do and that is what makes them so
precious and so irreplaceable.
Another generalization that occurs to me is that these prizewinners
illuminate what is so strong and so good about Toronto. We have a
population with people like these individuals in it, doing these kinds of
good things. That is our real wealth and our great hope. It is really
thrilling that we are sitting in a place where these four people and many
more can flourish and make a difference by their own efforts and their own
ideas to their colleagues and to people they don’t even know.
In Toronto, we have very little official power to govern ourselves as we
could and as we might. But as long as we’ve got people like Iria and Rollo
and Alan Broadbent–who is really the one who provides this prize–and a
jury who is not known, even to me, we’ve got a lot going for us.
