Jacquie Horvat, Treasurer and Co-founder

​Jacquie Horvat is the treasurer and a co-founder of Art With a Heart Inc.

As treasurer, Jacquie monitors donations, cash flow and expenditures and helps to implement the organization’s strategic plan in a fiscally responsible manner. She ensures that transactions and submissions are completed in a timely fashion and with integrity.

She is widely recognized as a detail-oriented person and spent the last 20 years working in the finance departments of large companies including Phillips Electronics, TSN, Digital, Compaq and Hewlett Packard. For these companies, she worked in credit and collections, ensured that accounting practices followed generally accepted practices and that transactions were legitimate and could bear scrutiny.

Currently, Jacquie is Director of Human Resources and Operations at Bakker Technical Services Ltd, where she oversees staffing as well as the efficient operations for this growing engineering firm. She is the past treasurer of the Pregnancy Help Centre and Eating Well.

As a co-founder of Art With a Heart, she is actively involved with implementing initiatives and executing the strategic plan. She also arranges for special permits, licensing and manages the organization’s documentation.

She co-created Art With a Heart to help people recognize they have a sense of worth. One of her favourite Art With a Heart moments was at the first gala in 2009, when the work of participants from the Durham Family Court Clinic was available for auction.

Jacquie had visited the youth during week six of the workshops, and found them to be representative of most teenagers: they attended with a mixed level of interest. On gala night, weeks after she had first met them in class, they were stimulated, excited and engaged. Each appeared amazed by the evening and awed by the fact that hundreds of highly influential people were there…for them. “I don’t think they had ever experienced this before. Basically, the night was all about them, and it told them that people believed in them,” she shared.

For Jacquie, Art With a Heart is about investing time and effort in people in a way that they feel worthy, so they begin to believe in themselves and find their voice.

“It’s like that one teacher in grade school that invested in a child for that one year, and this shaped them for their future,” she explained.

In addition to her full-time career and her volunteer work, Jacquie is an artist. She works with food and flowers and creates baskets, platters and shaped images like wishing wells made from watermelon slices. She is often hired for weddings and large events.

During the past seven years, she taught a whole cooking curriculum to children through the Town of Whitby’s after-school program and she continues to teach youth and children culinary skills through the Embassy Church. Many of her students have progressed to become teachers themselves.

Jacquie was born in Montreal and moved to the Scarborough area when she was 10 years old. She has lived in the Durham Region for 22 years.