Ken Battle is President of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy.  Before founding Caledon in 1992, he was Director of the National Council of Welfare, a citizens’ advisory body to the Minister of National Health and Welfare.

Educated at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and Oxford University in the UK, Ken is one of Canada’s leading social policy thinkers.  He has played a key role both inside and outside government in the reform of social policy, including the development of the new National Child Benefit and the proposed Seniors Benefit.  He served as a member of the Ministerial Task Force on Social Security Reform in 1994 and as policy advisor on child benefit reform to the Minister of Human Resources Development in 1996 and 1997. 

Sherri Torjman is Vice-President of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy.  She has written in the areas of welfare reform, customized training, disability income and supports, the social dimension of sustainable development and community-based poverty reduction.  Sherri is the author of the book Shared Space: The Communities Agenda.  She has also written many Caledon reports including Reclaiming our Humanity; Strategies for a Caring Society; Proposal for National Personal Supports Fund; Survival-of-the-Fittest Employment Policy; The Social Dimension of Sustainable Development; The Key to Kyoto: Social Dimensions of Climate Change; The Social Role of Local Government; The Canada Pension Plan Disability Benefit; Reintegrating the Unemployed through Customized Training; and How Finance Re-formed Social Policy.  

Sherri wrote the vision paper In Unison: A Canadian Approach to Disability Issues for the Federal/Provincial/Territorial Ministers Responsible for Social Services.  She has authored four books on disability policy: Income Insecurity, Poor Places, Nothing Personal and Direct Dollars.  Sherri wrote the welfare series of reports for the National Council of Welfare, including Welfare in Canada: The Tangled Safety Net; Welfare Reform; and Welfare Incomes 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1994. 

Sherri was co-Chair of the Technical Advisory Committee on Tax Measures for Persons with Disabilities that reported to the Minister of Finance and the Minister of National Revenue in December 2004.  She has worked for the House of Commons Committee on the Disabled and the Handicapped, the House of Commons Special Committee on Child Care and the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. 

Sherri taught a course in social policy at McGill University and is a former Board Member of the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

Michael Mendelson is Senior Scholar at the Caledon Institute of Social Policy.  He has held many senior public service positions prior to his appointment to the Caledon Institute.  He was the Deputy Secretary (Deputy Minister) of Cabinet Office in Ontario.  In Manitoba, he was Secretary to Treasury Board and Deputy Minister of Social Services.  He has served as Assistant Deputy Minister in Ontario’s Ministries of Finance, Community Services and Health.  He served a year as Visiting Fellow, Strategic Policy with Human Resources Development Canada.

Michael has been an active participant in many of Canada’s major developments in federal-provincial relations, finance and social policy in the last decades.  He co-chaired Ontario’s delegation on ‘division of powers’ in the Charlottetown Constitutional negotiations.  In the 1980s in the Federal Privy Council's Ministry of State for Social Development, he played a critical role in the development of the Canada Health Act.  He was a consultant for the Parliamentary Task Force on Federal-Provincial Fiscal Relations and for the more recent National Forum on Health.

Michael has published many articles on social and fiscal policy, as well as books on the issue of universality and the administrative cost of income security programs.  He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto School of Social Work and Visiting Fellow at Queen’s University School of Policy Studies.

Michael was also co-Principal Investigator of the ‘Speaking Out’ project: a multi-year qualitative research project looking at the effects of budget and tax cuts on Ontario households, through in depth interviews with 40 households over three years. 

Melanie Burston is Office Manager at the Caledon Institute.  Before joining the Caledon Institute, Melanie worked for several research institutes including the Centre for Trade Policy and Law affiliated with the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University.  In her former positions as Administrative Assistant, Conference Coordinator and Office Manager, Melanie organized and facilitated major conferences for the Centre including the design of camera-ready programs and brochures for marketing purposes.  Melanie has also worked in several administrative capacities with the Parliamentary Centre and the Institute for Research on Public Policy.  She is an active volunteer with many non-profit organizations in Ottawa, such as Planned Parenthood and the Unitarian Congregation’s Our Whole Lives (OWL) program whose mission relates to health care and AIDS prevention awareness.  Melanie coordinated a team of parents that organized a successful fundraising auction event for the Westboro Nursery School.

Anne Makhoul is Principal Project Officer for the Caledon Institute.  She is the lead writer and coordinator of the ‘community stories’ series – accounts of social policy in action which highlight innovative community initiatives.  She has written extensively in support of Vibrant Communities, the pan-Canadian community revitalization and poverty reduction initiative which Caledon helped found in 2002. 

Besides her work on community stories, Anne co-authored Caregivers and Dementia, a study commissioned by the Alzheimer Society of Ottawa and Renfrew County in 2008.  In 2007, she was the principal writer of ANC Sketches: Building a Neighbourhood Renewal Process.  This publication documented the change process and accompanying projects undertaken throughout the two-year action research project, Action for Neighbourhood Change.

Anne also performs research and project management duties for the Institute.  Joining Caledon in 2000, Anne previously had worked as a freelance writer, a project manager and writer/researcher for an environmentally-based consulting company, and an educator.

Warren McGillivray is a Policy Associate with the Caledon Institute.  He was Chief of the Studies and Operations Branch of the International Social Security Association (ISSA) from 1993 to 2004.  He joined the ISSA after serving the International Labour Office as Senior Actuary and Head of the Actuarial Section of the Social Security Department (1976-79 and 1985-89), Social Security Regional Adviser for Asia and the Pacific (1980-85) and Director of the ILO Office for the South Pacific (1989-93). Previously, he had been Lecturer in Statistics at the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Senior Lecturer in Actuarial Science at the University of Lagos.

Warren has undertaken numerous social security advisory missions and participated in projects involving financial studies, actuarial valuations and various aspects of social security policy and planning.  He has written extensively on social security financing and actuarial topics, and lectured on pensions and pension reform.Warren received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Saskatchewan.  He is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries.

Edward Tamagno is a Policy Associate with the Caledon Institute of Social Policy.  Prior to his affiliation with Caledon, Ed was a senior official in Departments of National Health and Welfare, Human Resources Development, and Social Development.  For more than 20 years, he was responsible for the negotiation of social security agreements on behalf of the Government of Canada.  These agreements coordinate Canada’s public pension system – the Old Age Security program and Canada Pension Plan – with the pension programs of other countries.  Under Ed’s leadership, Canada concluded 46 bilateral social security agreements.  This work provided him with the opportunity to study different models of social protection programs in countries around the world.

Ed held a number of other positions in the Government of Canada, including those of Policy Advisor to the Minister of National Health and Welfare and Director of the National Council of Welfare.

During has career in government, Ed had a long association with the International Social Security Association (ISSA), an international organization that brings together government departments, agencies and institutions administering social security programs in more than 140 countries around the world.  From 1998 to 2004 he served as the elected Treasurer of the ISSA.  Ed has presented papers at numerous ISSA meetings, as well as at meetings of other international organizations such as the Inter-American Conference on Social Security, at which he was the Canadian representative for almost 15 years.  He also represented Canada in international forums on social security organized by the Council of Europe.