With only a few months to go before the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games in Toronto, Karen Hacker is animated when she starts talking about the work and infrastructure required for an event of this size. Her role as Senior Vice-President Human Resources and Volunteers, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary is a departure for Karen. “You have to remember, the Games are a project, not a business. From a people perspective it’s quite complex; we have to recruit, train and deploy more than 23,000 volunteers. Then we determine how many volunteers we will need in what shifts on what days,” she says.

There were 30 employees when Karen joined the Games in November 2010. Currently there are over 700, and at the time of the Games, there will be more than 1,000 paid staff, plus multiple contractors. The Games, she says, have a very different growth trajectory than most jobs. “Eighty percent of the people will leave the day the Games end. The vast majority of those who remain will leave in the next few months. My role includes managing all of the build-up and then the take-down of the Games’ human infrastructure.”

Obviously, with all the planning and work that has gone into setting up the Games, Karen is very excited about the actual event. “I worked for the last 30 years in the private sector, always in entrepreneurial businesses, but this is the first time I have worked in an organization where the legacy impact of what I do is so enormous. I am just so excited about the huge impact the Games are going to leave on the City of Toronto and surrounding region.”

Karen sees multiple legacies coming from the Games. “When we talk about legacies, we generally mean three. There is the economic legacy, which is about the jobs that these projects create and tourism growth. There is also a sports legacy – for the first time in Canada, Canadian athletes are going to have high performance facilities in which they can train at home.” Karen cites the Cisco Milton Pan Am/Parapan Am Velodrome, the first indoor velodrome in Canada, as one of those high performance facilities.

She is quick to point out, however, that these are not just sport legacies; they are also community legacies. The Velodrome, constructed for the Games, will have an impact beyond Games’ events. “It will introduce young people to cycling on the track, have a walking and running track inside that, and have basketball courts on the infield,” she says. “From a legacy point of view, we are both changing the opportunities for Canadian athletes and giving our communities new facilities.”

“To me, however, the most important legacy is the social legacy,” Karen explains. “There are thousands of people who will step forward as volunteers; these Games celebrate diversity and inclusion; and there are young people who are coming from Canada and 40 other countries with dreams of winning gold. We get to participate in all of that and on a scale that makes these Games really special.”

For Karen, this job really touches on the things that she is passionate about: developing, helping and mentoring young people. “It also has the added benefit of being a city builder,” she continues, “and I think those things align really well because, if young people are engaged in their communities, you get better cities.” Karen admits she’s not an athlete herself. “For me this is less about any particular sport and more about the general impact of sport. We know that sport is an access point. Young people, who may be challenged in a variety of ways, can get ahead through sport. That’s what makes the potential of these Games so exciting.”

Her job at the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games is another role in an interesting and varied career. “I spent my first ten years as a commercial real estate lawyer, then some years as a commercial leasing lawyer before becoming a General Counsel,” she says. “The practice of law was becoming very specialized at a time when I was moving away from being a specialist to being a generalist. I used to worry about that, but it turns out that being a generalist is a specialty with its own discrete skill set.”

If she could go back and change anything in her career path, Karen says she still would have become a lawyer. “It’s really well-suited to my personality, but I would have done a finance or business degree as well,” she says. “It would have given me more confidence in the early years and the ability to move into an operations role sooner. I would encourage all women going into any career to have some business training before they complete their studies.”

Thinking about career advice she would give to a younger generation, Karen realizes that the world is very different from when she started out. “Technology changes so quickly and the younger generation is really skilled at keeping up with changes and adapting their work style to accommodate new systems. But technology doesn’t replace things like listening carefully and thinking deeply,” she says. “In a world of Twitter and social media, information is not always reliable, so young people have to remember to listen, to think, to dig, to question and to make sure they have all the facts.”