Rosalind Lockyer Receives Honourary Degree!
We were able to reach Rosalind Lockyer, CEO and founder of PARO while she was on vacation in rural Newfoundland to ask her some questions about her recently received Lakehead University honourary degree, her early years and the formation
You are back in Newfoundland for vacation.This is where you grew up?
“I was born in St John’s, Newfoundland. My daughter who was very young at the time was called upon to go to the National Ballerina School to attend their professional school. She had been performing in Newfoundland. Of course she wanted to go, as that was her dream, and we decided to move Oshawa first and then to Thunder Bay.” “Rural Newfoundland is much the same as rural Ontario. It is a challenge for entrepreneurs. Governments need to improve rural cell service and provide good internet as they want business to succeed and you need these services just like more urban centers have. Most of Canada is rural.”
“In Newfoundland I went to Memorial University and became a teacher. In Thunder Bay later on I went back to Lakehead University to get certified for Ontario.”
You have had your own background as an entrepreneur Ros?
“I had a craft business, I would say I was an artisan. We made apple dolls that had carved out faces to look like important figures like Pierre Trudeau. We then would dress them and sell them across Canada through an agent.The face was an apple that shriveled up and dried with a wire body with knit sweaters based on the character. It was a trendy thing then.We also made costumes.”
“The apple dolls petered out and my husband and I started a business here in Thunder Bay called Mary Brown’s Chicken, as well a business called Skippers Johns Seafood with product from Newfoundland. Some came as frozen but the biggest part was fresh seafood from Newfoundand.”
“Many of my family are in business. My brother, my husband and my father were all in business. My father was a carpenter and would build houses and then sell them. My husbands parents were fish merchants and had a big general store in Newfoundland. They sold fresh fish and salt fish and exported to places like Jamaica.”
“There were a lot of business people in our family so it was a natural progression. I was a teacher by trade when we moved to
Ontario. Instead of teaching I decided to be an entrepreneur.”
You had some medical problems that affected your early business?
“In the early 90’s I got sick with colon cancer and was getting operations for three years. When I started to get better I thought I don’t want to go back teaching so that is when I started doing apple dolls with my neighbour and the Mary Browns and seafood store with my husband. When I became ill my husband decided to sell the businesses as he was the manager of an insurance company as well. It was too much at the time.”
The early start of the current Paro operation started at this time?
“When I got better I wanted to do something new in business. I first started with a very short term contract with Thunder Bay Ventures for about a year. Before I moved from Thunder Bay Ventures I convinced them to give me some loan money to give to women from Jobs Ontario and Thunder Bay
Ventures.”
“It was then that I started Paro is 1995. The actual organization that became Paro was a project called Women’s Community Loan Fund which was a peer lending system that we still do today.The Paro peer system, our model, is the largest in North America with 180 peer lending circles.”
“Then we got our charitable non profit status and changed our name. We decided to call it Paro with our then Board of Directors, some 27 years ago this January.”
So you founded the Paro organization Ros?
“I was definitely the founder of Paro. It was originally a project of Jobs Ontario. From that I founded the organization with a board of directors as a full training organization for business and women with mentoring, training, counselling, peer lending, grants and loans and networking. There was the
Ontario Trillium organization as an original funder and then we took on more and more funding partners. We have been growing really since 1995. We work all over the province now.”
You had to be an entrepreneur yourself to make this growth happen?
“The original project was my idea. At the beginning many would say what do you mean give $1000 to women so that they can start a business.You can’t start a business with $1000 and what do you mean they can have a business out of their home, this is crazy! But you see how crazy it is now because the proof is in the doing. I see that now with the women.You dream what you want to dream and you know yourself and what you are capable of. You are just as good as anyone else if you work at it. No one is going to do it for you though. People are not always going to say when you have a dream this will be simple just go and do it. In my time I had a lot of people say this won’t work. You had to show them it would work one step at a time and then they would give you more money.”