P2P introduces new CLT co-chair: Linda Coltman
Pathway to Potential
P2P is pleased to announce Linda Coltman as the new co-chair of Pathway to Potential’s (P2P’s) Collaborative Leadership Team.
Linda has extensive experience in working with a variety of stakeholder groups and organizations. She has also worked closely with political and social service groups to improve conditions for persons with disabilities, seniors, and low-income individuals and families.
In taking on the role of P2P CLT Co-Chair, Linda commits to using her political and business savvy combined with all of her communication and leadership skills to their fullest to publicly promote and champion P2P within the community and in all efforts aimed at ensuring a vibrant Windsor and Essex County (WEC)
Linda identifies/self discloses as a person with lived experience to poverty, disability and homelessness and as such has dedicated a great deal of time and effort to raising awareness about poverty and mobilizing support and participation across multiple sectors towards a personal goal of reducing poverty and ensuring the social and economic wellbeing of everyone within Ontario.
Linda is an assertive and passionate advocate for poverty related issues and possesses a great practicality in approaching them. As a person with lived experience to poverty, disability, and homelessness, Linda’s leadership example as an activist centers around her belief that is essential for those with lived experience to marginalization to try to find the courage, dignity and hope to stand up and make their voices heard in order to be catalysts of change rather than victims of circumstances.
Linda is a long-term kidney transplant recipient who experienced homeless and clinical depression while she was a teenager undergoing acute renal failure. After receiving stable housing in an affordable housing community and the aforementioned lifesaving organ transplant, Linda went on to experience over two decades of living in poverty/on ODSP income supports as a person with chronic disabilities. Throughout this time however, Linda remained active as a leader in the identification and implementation of strategic goals and functions related to poverty reduction efforts filling a variety of board, advisory and other assorted leadership roles within the housing and health sectors.
In addition to her new role as CLT Co-Chair with Pathway to Potential, Linda is also a member Voices Against Poverty and a member at large of the Voices From the Street (VFTS) speakers’ bureau.
Among her many prior leadership affiliations, Linda is also a former Steering Committee member of the 25in5 Network for Poverty Reduction and the Housing Network of Ontario and is a graduate of the Maytree Foundation’s Leaders For Change and School 4 Civics Leadership Programs and also a graduate/certified peer recovery educator of the Peer Recovery Education for Employment and Resilience (PREFER) program.
Credit: Pathway to Potential
