The Heart and Stroke Foundation’s board of directors is pleased to announce the appointment of Yves Savoie to Chief Executive Officer, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada effective April 26, 2017.
One Canadian dies of heart disease or stroke every seven minutes. It can happen in an instant or over time, striking indiscriminately and forever altering everyone it touches. This stark reality drives our fight to protect life.
For more than 60 years, Heart & Stroke has worked tirelessly to advance research, raise awareness and improve prevention and treatment. Our efforts have helped to greatly reduce the mortality rate, but that is not enough and we’re losing ground in the face of new challenges.
Yves joins the Foundation at an exciting time as our transformation, reflected in our bold, modern logo, rolls out across the country and Canadians are re-introduced to the organization and their passion and commitment re-ignited by better understanding the important work that we do. He will lead our team of volunteers and employees to new levels of success as we reach for our vision of ‘healthy lives free of heart disease and stroke.’
The Foundation has ambitious mission and fundraising goals, and Yves will continue to build our organization and bring it to the next level. He will provide leadership and strategic guidance for our world-class CCVD research program, our health promotion and advocacy work and participate fully in realizing our fundraising goals. To accomplish our mission in today’s health care landscape, we must make the next medical breakthroughs; we must push harder, lead change, and be more inventive. We have a responsibility to evolve.
For the last decade Yves has been the CEO of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada. He is a fierce advocate for a health system that is genuinely patient-centered and is deeply knowledgeable about the unique role of health charities working closely with the research communities and governments in enabling Canadians to live healthy lives and to live well with chronic disease and disabilities. He brings a depth of fundraising experience and is passionate about the opportunities to build new streams of revenues and to harness the potential of the digital revolution. Yves is Acadian from New Brunswick and is bilingual.
Under Yves’s leadership, Heart & Stroke will push harder, lead change and be more inventive in order to fund the medical breakthroughs that will prevent disease, save lives and promote recovery, improving heart and brain health.
The strength of Heart & Stroke and every Canadian is interconnected. Communities across the country depend on us and we depend on them. And we all have unfinished business. Now is the time to address it. Now is the time to make sure we don’t miss out on life.