What a great year to reflect on in 2015. There were many highlights for ULI Toronto this year – a moment for our organization that seemed to start on a high note and end with a major crescendo.

In this, our tenth year in Toronto, we hosted many major events that built on the tradition of delivering quality professional programming and networking opportunities for our members and the broader city building community. These included our annual Fireside Chat which this year featured the newly elected Toronto Mayor, John Tory. Our annual ‘Large Scale Event’, which assembled an international panel of airport experts, focused on the planning and development implications of Pearson outgrowing its capacity in twenty years.  And, our 905 Event examined how well our outer suburbs are accommodating the Millennial generation.

We co-hosted our Annual ULI/Rotman School event on the Pan Am Games Athletes Village, led our second annual ‘Tour de Toronto’ bicycle exploration of Toronto’s Waterfront, and enjoyed our best ever summer social event welcoming not just our young leaders but our entire ULI community with ULI Connect – connecting young professionals and those beyond that age category to once again bring our community ‘together’. And, we hosted our second Urban Ideas Competition, directing creative ideas to Brampton City Centre, an important suburban city that has attracted a lot of attention this year.

In the spring, we introduced a new gala event ‘Meet the Chiefs’ which brought the entire Greater Golden Horseshoe’s Chief Planners together with the region’s private sector land use professionals. This event signaled a renewed commitment for ULI to act regionally and more fully embrace and connect the public sector in our leadership.

We experimented with our first Urban Intervention event that brought the full spotlight of ULI to a deserted old factory, the Cannon Knitting Mills, in Hamilton – and showed that having fun is part of making an impact.

But the really big story for us this year was our inaugural Fall Symposium on mixed-use intensification, bringing together over 60 speakers and 750 attendees to what many of our members described as the most interesting conference Toronto has seen in years. This was a careful plan that was hatched over five years ago and came to fruition in a year where our city and our region had so much to celebrate and explore.

All of these activities help explain why 2015 was such an important year by the numbers. Membership at 1200 people, up 47% since last year; Event Attendance at 4100 people, up 45% over the year before; and even our reach in the Twittersphere at a record-breaking 3,670 visits were made to ULI Toronto’s twitter profile and our tweets had over 95,000 unique views. Something we have not yet experienced in our history.

Most critically, 2015 was a year of strategic alignment, which has provided us our greatest moment to pursue our global mission to advance the responsible use of land.

Led by our newly appointed Advisory Board and incredible leadership at the Management Committee (our operating Board), we are honing our focus as a steward of the real estate industry – an international and multi-sector organization seized with the promotion of urban land use solutions to tackle our regions greatest challenges of mobility, economy, environment, health, and social equity.

Looking ahead to 2016, it will be an honour to complete my two-year term as ULI Toronto’s Chair.  This year I will concentrate my efforts on solidifying our organization with the delivery of a membership base of 1500 strong and proud ULI supporters, ensure the strength of our financial capacity as an organization so that we may focus our attentions on the critical task that lies ahead, and, continue my focus on delivering leadership succession at the highest level. Most importantly I will seek to ensure that our hard work, incredible efforts and successes in 2015 will allow ULI to deliver ‘real’ and ‘meaningful’ community impact to realize our full potential in the years ahead.

Happy Holidays to all, and best wishes for a truly meaningful 2016.