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Christine Bertrand, CMA, Samson-Bélair/Deloitte & Touche
Photo: Marie-Claude Hamel
MAKING TIME FOR OUTSIDE WORK
Christine Bertrand, CMA
By day, Christine Bertrand conducts internal audits of companies as part of Samson-Bélair/Deloitte & Touche, the Quebec section of Deloitte, one of the largest professional services firms in the world. In her spare time, however, she volunteers her skills to non-profit organizations. “I was always involved in everything. At university I was the president of the CMA committee, and in high school I organized a lot of activities. It’s important for me to be with people and just to try to make a better work environment.”
Bertrand began volunteering at age 17, when she went to work in Haiti for three weeks. “That was my first travel without my parents,” she recounts, “in the worst living conditions I had ever seen.” With 10 other students, she lived in a village where she worked at a daycare, helped paint a school and lent a hand patching the potholes of a local road.
Her interest in non-profit organizations continued throughout her university training at HEC Montréal, where she chose to do a CMA because of its interdisciplinary design. “We looked at HR, accounting, IT management, strategy, control.” Her studies culminated with an MSc in administration (accounting option), for which she wrote her thesis on the governance of three non-profit organizations.
For the past four years, Bertrand has fed her passion for community involvement by volunteering at least three to five hours per week at Baobab Familial, a non-profit organization dedicated to the multi-ethnic families of Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood. Its volunteers provide listening and referral services, help people find employment and housing or adjust to their new language, and offer in-home assistance to single-parent families.
Each year, they serve more than 1,500 people, most of whom are immigrants and refugees. She first began volunteering with Baobab Familial by giving an accounting course to the employees. From there, she got on board as treasurer, and now she chairs the board of directors. Bertrand’s responsibilities currently encompass everything from monitoring the budget and financial statements to finding a new manager on short notice.
Bertrand recently began to take her humanitarian interests farther afield. In February 2007, instead of spending her two weeks of vacation time on a tropical beach, Bertrand chose to sign up for Uniterra’s Leave for Change program, which sends employees from participating companies to volunteer in developing countries during their annual leave. Bertrand went to the city of Kougoudou in the West African country of Burkina Faso to support the staff of ADIP/S (Association pour le développement des initiatives de prévention en santé et solidarité, an organization that fights poverty and HIV/AIDS) in the preparation of financial statements and reports for their stakeholders.
She had to be flexible and quickly adjust her approach to best address their needs during her short time there. “Very often we want to help, but we just don’t take into consideration what is important for them.” Her only equipment proved to be a computer and an Excel spreadsheet, with which she managed to help the NGO set up an accounting system.
When asked what drives her to give time to non-profit organizations, Bertrand replies, “I know that I cannot change the world, but I think that if we all [contribute] a small part, we can change at least a small thing.”
-----Did you know?
If you’re interested in volunteering your accounting skills overseas, Uniterra’s Leave for Change program supports a range of employee action in the developing world. It currently has agreements with the following Canadian employers:
• Abbott Canada
• Addenda Capital
• A. Lassonde Inc.
• Bibliothèque et Archives
nationales du Québec
• CGI
• Ville de Montréal
• Samson-Bélair/Deloitte &
Touche
• Desjardins
• MIRTEC Inc.
• University of Guelph
For more information, visit www.uniterra.ca
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