Cate Creede-Desmarais, PhD, PCC

Partner

Cate is an experienced change and strategy consultant, a certified professional coactive coach (PCC), an educator and innovator in the sphere of generative leadership, and a hands-on not-for-profit leader.
Cate’s mission is to design and lead conversations and interventions that mobilize groups toward socially accountable change while building capacity to lead and influence that change.  As a partner in the consulting firm The Potential Group, Cate has designed, facilitated and supported more than 300 strategic planning and change initiatives in health and education and similar environments.

Cate is Program Lead of New and Evolving Academic Leaders (NEAL) program, a partnership of Unity Health and the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. Cate oversaw an overhaul of the NEAL curriculum to centre anti-oppression and equity as essential to leadership, which was recognized with the 2023-24 Colin Woolf Award for Excellence in Program Development and Coordination.

Cate also supports capacity building and development in her role as a coach, and is co-lead of the Leading Strategic Change and Integration program run by The Potential Group and several customized learning programs for various Departments and units.  In all of her work, Cate is actively engaged in creating inclusive, “brave” spaces for transforming inequitable power structures, including volunteering her time and expertise in strategic planning and coaching as an ally for racialized organizations and individuals.

Cate’s PhD is in Human and Organizational Systems, and she holds an adjunct lecturer position in the Division of Psychotherapy, Humanities, and Psychosocial Interventions in the Department of Psychiatry at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.  She holds a graduate certificate in Dialogue, Deliberation and Public Engagement, and has completed the San’yas Indigenous Cultural Safety training.  In addition to her core training in co-active coaching, she has advanced certification in Trauma-Informed Coaching, Diversity Coaching, Organizational and Relational Systems Coaching, and Interpersonal Neurobiology.

Cate (she/they) identifies as a white settler of Franco-Ontarian ancestry, and has been involved in intersectional feminist, gender and queer advocacy since the 1980s. For the past 17 years, Cate has also been the volunteer Co-Director of a children’s development project in Uganda called Nikibasika Learning and Development Program, which has supported a group of 52 orphaned and vulnerable children and youth to become community oriented, globally aware, self-sustaining citizens.