Speakers

Christa Haanstra is a nationally recognized knowledge leader and convener on the issue of working caregivers - one of the fastest-growing and least visible pressures shaping today’s workforce.

She leads the Working Caregiver initiative for the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence (a program of the Azrieli Foundation). In this role, she helps elevate caregiving from a private challenge to a recognized workforce reality -  one with significant implications for retention, wellbeing and workforce participation.

In 2024, Christa convened and facilitated national Supporting Caregivers in the Workplace roundtables, bringing together employers, HR leaders and benefits providers to share emerging practices, examine persistent blind spots, and explore how caregiving is currently understood - and often misunderstood - in workplace contexts. These discussions reinforced a central insight: caregiving is already embedded in the workforce, yet remains largely absent from how work is designed, measured and discussed.

Christa is known for her ability to hold complexity — combining data, lived experience and narrative to help leaders see issues they may not yet have language for. Her work emphasizes awareness-building, sense-making, and creating the conditions for more informed conversations about work, care and human capacity.

She is an alumna of the University of Ottawa and Seneca College and also has her designation as an Executive Scholar in Non-Profit Management (2020) from the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Christa has earned awards for her leadership in strategy, communication and engagement.