Heather Culbert of Calgary has built a career around a simple instinct: when she sees an opportunity to make something better, she brings people together and gets to work. Her work to connect people, ideas and resources around a common purpose spans decades. Heather’s leadership has helped build and transform organizations in Alberta’s energy sector, advance women in leadership, strengthen education and governance, and turn the long-held vision for Calgary’s new cancer centre into reality.
Heather Joan Culbert is, quite simply, someone who gets things done. She was born in Wainwright in 1959, the eldest of 5 children of Stewart and Connie Cooper. Growing up in a large family, she developed an early sense of responsibility for the people and world around her. At 35, the SAIT Polytechnic Computer Technology graduate took on a senior role at Enerplus, an independent Canadian oil and gas company. She was rare in her field: a female senior information technology leader in the petroleum industry. One year later, she became a senior vice-president.
Her whole-of-system thinking led her into strategic planning and systems integration, helping position the company to execute more than $7 billion in mergers and acquisitions. But Heather had always planned to leave corporate life at 45. “I work-graduated,” she says. “I was way too young to retire and I felt as though I had this huge opportunity to make a difference.”
One of the challenges that drew her was deeply personal. Heather’s mother, Connie, lived with cancer for 25 years, and Heather accompanied her through appointments, surgeries and treatments. At Calgary’s Tom Baker Cancer Centre, the care from staff was exceptional, but the facility itself could no longer keep pace with demand and advances in cancer care.
Her mother’s experience had already moved Heather to action. She joined the board of the Alberta Cancer Foundation, where she became deeply involved in efforts to improve cancer care in Alberta. Then, in 2009, while serving on the board, cancer became personal in an entirely new way.
After an annual mammogram, Heather was diagnosed with breast cancer. Although there may have been a genetic connection to her mother’s cancer, she had never expected to face the disease herself. Fortunately, it was detected early and her outcome was excellent. But becoming a patient gave Heather a different view of the cancer system – no longer only as a daughter and board member, but from the inside. She had left corporate life knowing she wanted to make a difference. Now she knew where she wanted to make that difference. Improving cancer care had become more than a cause: Heather recognized it as part of her life’s purpose.
A year after her diagnosis, Heather chaired Calgary’s Weekend to End Women’s Cancer. Her team, Heather’s Heroes, walked 60 km, breaking the event’s single team fundraising record. It was an early demonstration of what would become a hallmark of Heather’s approach to cancer care: bringing people together around an ambitious goal and turning their collective commitment into action.
Through her work with the Alberta Cancer Foundation, Heather became deeply involved in the effort to secure a new cancer centre – one with the resources and capacity that southern Alberta needed. She and the board made the case for a new centre, only to see the promise to build it fall through again. And again.
When her board term ended in 2013, Heather kept going. She encouraged former board director John Osler to join her in keeping alive the vision of the facility Calgary and southern Alberta could have. Their advocacy helped maintain momentum around the project, which ultimately received a $1.4 billion commitment from the Alberta government.
The new centre also needed extraordinary community support. Heather helped bring together the Alberta Cancer Foundation, the University of Calgary, and Alberta Health Services around a shared vision for philanthropy. She created a campaign committee and co-chaired it with John Osler and Calgary Chamber of Commerce CEO Deborah Yedlin. With 30 campaign members representing the community, they launched OWN.CANCER with a goal of raising $250 million.
Calgary and southern Alberta responded. Some 17,000 donors supported the campaign, which surpassed its original goal by raising $300 million in 2.5 years, one year ahead of schedule. The result helped support one of North America’s largest and most advanced comprehensive cancer centres. Heather points to the collective effort: “I am forever grateful to the OWN.CANCER team, our volunteers, and our donors for believing in what was possible and helping make it happen.”
That same instinct – identify a gap and bring people together to address it – has shaped Heather’s work to advance women in leadership.
After leaving the corporate world, Heather was eager to contribute in the boardroom, but the opportunities were not coming. She discovered that women held only 12% of board positions in Alberta compared with approximately 20% across the rest of Canada. She realized the issue was much larger than her own experience: Alberta had an extraordinary pool of experienced women who simply were not being seen.
As Heather is known to ask when confronting a problem, “if not us, then who?”
With former Enerplus colleague Jennifer Koury, Heather founded the non-profit Board Ready Women in 2017. Its purpose was to increase the visibility of talented women and connect them with mentors, governance experts, executive recruiters and one another, helping to prepare them for board opportunities. Board Ready Women has since grown to more than 400 members nationwide, while the proportion of women serving on Alberta boards has risen to approximately 25%.
In 2019, Heather co-founded Axis Connects, a non-profit that helps women navigate their career journeys, develop skills and networks, and see themselves as leaders. Supported by corporate Calgary and offered without a membership fee, Axis Connects has grown into a significant leadership community. Its annual Calgary Influential Women in Business Awards brings together approximately 1,500 people to recognize women leaders and a male champion for the role men play in advancing women. At its heart is a belief Heather often shares: if you see it, you can be it.
Across her governance and community work, Heather has focused on health care, education, leadership and technology. She has chaired the United Way of Calgary and Area and the United Way World Leadership Council, chaired the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and the Alberta Research and Innovation Advisory Council, and was a Jarislowsky Co-Fellow at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary.
Her governance experience extends nationally and across business. Now in her 12th year on the board of Export Development Canada, she has also served as a director of Whitecap Resources and currently serves on the boards of Catapult Environmental, the Fraser Institute, and InterGen. Most recently, she joined the board of the Rideau Hall Foundation. She earned her ICD.D designation in 2020 and later completed the GCB.D ESG certification through Competent Boards.
Family has remained central throughout Heather’s life. She and her husband, Mike, raised their children, Lindsay and Sean, while navigating demanding careers and an active family life. Today they delight in being grandparents to Ryder and Raya, and in passing along the values that have shaped their lives: family, community and helping others.
Heather and Mike established a family philanthropy fund to involve their children in giving and build a tradition of community involvement across generations. Together, the family discusses priorities, investments and stewardship – ensuring that philanthropy becomes not simply something their children inherit, but something they understand and carry forward.
Heather’s contributions have been recognized widely. She and Mike were inducted into the Southern Alberta Business Hall of Fame in 2025, and in 2024, the City of Calgary recognized Heather as Calgarian of the Year. Her other honours include the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (Alberta), the Women’s Energy Council Female Executive of the Year award, the Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers (2018), the Doc Seaman Outstanding Individual Philanthropist award, and the Alberta Centennial Medal. She has been recognized from SAIT as a Distinguished Alumna (2003) and with an honorary Bachelor of Science degree (2014).
Heather accepts these honours with gratitude, but she is more interested in what remains to be done than in what has already been accomplished. For her, leadership is about seeing what is possible, bringing the right people together, and turning good intentions into meaningful action.
Her impact has rarely been the work of one person, and she is quick to say so. Heather’s particular strength has been recognizing what is possible, assembling the people who can make it happen, and creating the momentum to move an idea forward.
“I get enormous satisfaction from helping others succeed and from rallying people around something that matters. There are always gaps to fill, opportunities to create, and ways to make our community stronger,” she says.
And she has no intention of slowing down.
“I want to leave things better than I found them. There is still so much more we can do.”