Tanya Rumble ʼ08, ʼ12
Faculty of Social Sciences
Social Sciences Grad Named one of Canada’s 100 Most Powerful Women
Tanya Rumble believes in radical curiosity. She believes that life’s greatest challenge is the process of unlearning— of continually critiquing, questioning, and examining our own beliefs and biases and challenging our world view.
It’s this radical curiosity that has guided Tanya through an impressive career spanning public health, fundraising management, teaching, and entrepreneurship, and most recently, earned her the title of one of Canada’s top 100 Most Powerful Women of 2023.
Tanya’s dedication to justice, equity, diversity and inclusion has made a lasting impact on Canada’s philanthropic sector. From leading the integration of land acknowledgements into all Canadian Cancer Society’s fundraising events, to securing some of the largest major gifts to an Indigenous-led research organization in Canada, Tanya's deep commitment to reconciliation, decolonization and indigenization guides every aspect of her work.
Tanya’s passion for social justice dates back to her high school years. Over the course of her undergraduate degree at McMaster, this interest continued to grow and evolve. While she was initially enrolled in a Bachelor of Commerce, by her second year, her interests led her to political science. “I had a really positive, transformative undergraduate education,” she says. Tanya was involved in a wide range of clubs and on-campus activities that provided her with valuable work experience. “At McMaster, I took every opportunity to participate in co-curricular and experiential learning opportunities,” she says. “I was really able to benefit from the relationships that I formed both with friends, faculty and staff that supported me along the way.”
Tanya was the co-chair of McMaster’s World Congress, an active member of the Model UN program, the outreach coordinator for the Student Health and Education Centre, and the lead volunteer with the Student Wellness Centre. At the latter, Tanya was encouraged by a nurse supervisor to pursue a career in public health. "She helped me find a part-time role at Halton Public Health during my fourth year, working in youth mental health promotion,” she says. Tanya worked in high schools, creating dialogue about mental health and wellbeing while simultaneously screening students who were experiencing suicidal ideation or depression. She would connect these students to the public health nurse in their school. “That experience was tremendous,” she says, “and really built on a lot of the skills and leadership I gained on campus at the Student Wellness Center.”
After graduation, Tanya landed a full-time job as a public health promoter, a career she worked in for four years. Her initial focus was on population-level health initiatives like nutrition, physical activity and smoking cessation, but when the H1N1 virus hit, she was redeployed to help run one of the largest vaccination clinics in the Halton region.
While Tanya enjoyed her career in public health, she yearned to work on initiatives that had a more immediate impact. “With public health initiatives, it can take years to see shifts in the population health curve,” she says. Tanya was seeking a more entrepreneurial role that would allow her to focus on business development. So, when she saw an opening for a fundraising role working on third party events with ethno-cultural communities at the Heart and Stroke Foundation, she thought it was a perfect way to marry her interests.
Making the transition from public health to fundraising wasn’t easy, but Tanya enjoyed the challenge. “I had the acumen and aptitude to build relationships— that's why my manager took a chance on me, and I never looked back,” she says.
Thanks to all of Tanya’s extracurriculars at McMaster, she wasn’t a total stranger to fundraising. She had gained valuable experience securing sponsors for the World Congress and fundraising for various clubs. “I can look back to those early experiences and say those were pretty formative in my future career aspirations and trajectory,” she says. In the years that followed, Tanya took on increasingly senior roles at several large Canadian non-profit organizations, and eventually found her way back to her alma mater, this time leading McMaster’s planned giving and legacy giving program for the university.
Today, Tanya is the Executive Director of Development in the Faculty of Arts and at Yellowhead Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), where she leads fundraising strategy. She gets the most gratification fundraising for Black and Indigenous-led initiatives. “There have been lots of calls
to support Black and Indigenous-led charitable organizations, but unfortunately there hasn’t been substantive changes in that,” she says. “I feel like I can make a tangible difference in the work that I do as a fundraising leader to support that.”
Recently, Tanya helped secure two seven-figure gifts for the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led research and education centre within TMU’s Faculty of Arts. “These are some of the largest gifts to an Indigenous research organization in Canada,” she says.
In addition to her role as Executive Director, Tanya is a part-time instructor at Humber College in the Fundraising Management program. She is also the co-founder of
Recast Philanthropy, which helps fundraisers and fundraising organizations implement more equitable philanthropy practices.
Through Recast Philanthropy, Tanya and her co-founder Nicole McVan offer a monthly
Community of Practice that helps fundraising professionals navigate situations and issues related to equity, inclusion and accessibility that arise with donors and volunteers.
Being named one of Canada’s 100 Most Powerful Women of 2023 is particularly meaningful to Tanya as one of few Black female leaders in the advancement and fundraising sector. “I don’t really have a lot of role models that look like me,” she says. “While I may not represent all the intersectional identities […] I hope that I can represent a possible path forward for folks that are interested in similar careers and want to make a similar impact in their own way.”
Tanya is humbled to have received this award and, while she isn’t focused on accolades, she views the recognition as validation that her work is having a positive impact. “That's ultimately how I want to live my life— to create positive impact, to radically interrogate biases, to be unsatisfied with the status quo, but not to harm people in the process,” she says. “I really appreciate that I've been recognized for that and assume that means that I'm doing what I set out to do.”