Brewster joins RRU Board of Governors

Kevin Brewster has been appointed to the Royal Roads Board of Governors for a three-year term. Brewster brings a wealth of public institutional experience with expertise in post-secondary funding, and developing public capital projects including schools, hospitals and post-secondary education buildings. With his career beginnings in architecture and later moving towards working in government, Brewster understands that people’s careers, including his own, have many branches.

“For me, and I think for many people, careers are not a straight path. It’s not always a trajectory upward. I’ve had some false starts, I’ve taken different paths, one or two were dead ends, I’ve always managed to learn something from those, and then build on that towards something better. I think many of the students who are studying at RRU…they have reached that point in their career to say I want to do something more challenging or make greater contributions to society, and RRU’s unique and challenging programs will help them make that transition.”

Brewster says he was able to make his own career transition to a more executive role with government after obtaining his Master of Business Administration from Manchester Business School.

“The MBA program at Manchester in the nineties was unique at that time – a combination of in-class instruction and working on live assignments with companies around the UK” he says.

While Brewster’s career path began in architecture and construction consulting and wound its way to public capital projects like building hospitals and schools, he says the common thread is collaboration.

“I’ve worked on projects from very large to very small. Often some of the small projects are the most rewarding because with a little bit of money, you make a lasting change. For example, the Dogwood Auditorium is a little jewel…collaborating with RRU, we made it happen from donations and surplus money from other projects, and there it is. We took an old swimming pool facility and made what is, a very fine auditorium and filled an infrastructure gap for the university. I’m actually quite proud of it; most of the time I don’t see the work I worked on, but I got a tour recently and it’s just lovely.”

Brewster says that Royal Roads is a well-administered organization with a proud heritage and he’s honoured to be able to contribute to its continued success.

And of course, the best success: students who go on to discover new careers.

“I think that something that is really exciting is to see students succeed. On my calendar there are a few sessions (coming up) for Convocation and I can remember my own convocations, and it’s a very exciting time, a little bit of a scary time, because something is coming to an end and you’re stepping out into the unknown. But it’s a real mark of achievement. To be able to help students celebrate that success, I’m really looking forward to that.”

Read Kevin Brewster’s Board of Governors biography.