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Stratford Festival's top executive receives honorary doctorate at Western convocation

Stratford Festival executive director Anita Gaffney spoke at the 2019 convocation ceremony for students graduating from the University of Western Ontario's Faculty of Arts, and received an honorary Doctorate of Laws.

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When Stratford Festival executive director Anita Gaffney graduated with an English and literature degree from the Western University nearly 30 years ago, she didn’t know where her next steps would take her.

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“It seemed like everybody had their stuff together. My friends were going to teachers’ college and on to graduate school. … I was like every other kid who graduated university. I didn’t know what I was going to do with an English degree,” Gaffney said. “It really does qualify your for nothing and everything.”

Yet, on Oct. 25, Gaffney returned to Western, having risen through the ranks at the Stratford Festival and accomplished more than she could have ever imagined, to speak to a class of graduates and receive an honorary doctorate of laws.

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“I think anything you say (at convocation) sounds totally and completely cliché. When I was researching these speeches, it’s like, ‘Follow your passion and be kind,’ but it just makes you (sick),” Gaffney said. “You know, I really thought of my niece and nephew. They’re in their 20s, so I kind of was thinking of these two people in the world today – they’ve been graduated now for a couple of  years.

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“And (my advice) is essentially to follow your passion, but what is hard is to find out what that is. That’s what’s hard when you’re a kid. Reflecting back on it, I can recognize what it is, but at the time I was like, ‘I don’t know.'”

Though she had taken a course that introduced her to the works of Shakespeare and had fallen madly in love with the universal nature of the playwright’s stories and the poetry within, Gaffney had no inclination as to how she would transform that passion into a career.

So she considered other paths, even taking the LSAT with the thought of perhaps going to law school. Ultimately, it was her connections to the Stratford Festival, having worked for a summer as a “snack cart girl,” that gave her an in when a position in the Festival’s communications department became available.

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“When I worked there as a cart girl, I loved the plays so much, but I couldn’t imagine what I was going to do there. I couldn’t imagine how I could play a role at the Festival, so it wasn’t on my radar at all. It was just a summer job,” Gaffney said. ” … It wasn’t until I came back and I started as a publicity assistant and I loved it from the very beginning. I loved working with the media … because I had to translate what was happening at the Festival, and I got to learn from their perspectives about the larger art world.

“They’d tell me about the other shows they’d seen and what they thought about the shows, and I pitched stories to them. … I loved it and I had every crappy job at the beginning.”

But it was that willingness to do anything the Festival asked in the interest of serving the company’s greater good that made her invaluable, and when opportunities for advancement came along – first to director of marketing, and then to executive director a little more than a decade later – she found her name at the top of the heap.

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“Janice Price became director of marketing about a year into my time at the Festival, and she was a big mentor. She was a person who was like, ‘Anything was possible,’ said yes to everything, and dropped me into things I was way not qualified for,” Gaffney recalled.

After Price left a few years later, Gaffney was encouraged by a member of the Festival’s board of governors to put her name in for the job – despite her having only worked at the Festival for a few years – and the rest is history.

Since then, Gaffney has helped bring the Festival through a period of difficult cutbacks without impacting the organization’s artistic integrity and, as executive director, guided the launch of a number of new initiatives including The Forum, The Laboratory, the HD film series, and the Stratford Direct Bus service, not to mention her ongoing work on the new Tom Patterson Theatre.

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And last year, Gaffney was named one of Canada’s most powerful women by the Women’s Executive Network.

“Anita has done a terrific job as executive director of the Stratford Festival,” said Dr. Lee Myers, a member of Western’s faculty of medicine who worked with Gaffney for many years on the Festival’s board of governors. “She is smart, hard-working and determined – a very clear and logical thinker. She is a pleasure to work with and she exemplifies the important concept of leading by example.”

So when it came time to say something of value to students graduating from the faculty of arts and humanities last month, Gaffney offered the one piece of advice she would have found useful when she was in their shoes.

“I thought the biggest gift I could give them was to be brief and try to reassure them that the uncertainty they feel is normal,” Gaffney said. “You find your way.”

gsimmons@postmedia.com

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