You could call him a tireless fundraiser or consummate citizen, but Bill Hubbs said his drive to make the Coast a better place is really just a product of his natural desire to build things.
"I guess it's just one of those things I learned over time," said Hubbs, 65, chair of the St. Mary's Hospital Foundation, and one of 45 winners of a 2008 B.C. Community Achievement Award. It's an honour bestowed on him by the B.C. Achievement Foundation, created five years ago with a $6 million endowment from the province, for Hubbs' instrumental work in leading a fundraising drive to purchase a CAT (computer-assisted tomography) scanner for St. Mary's Hospital. "It gives me enjoyment helping out. But I give credit to the community -there's 2,700 people that came together so fast," he said, referring to the army of donors that made the fundraising drive such a success. Hubbs recalls fundraisers from St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver estimating it would take two years for the community to raise the $2.1 million needed for the CAT scanner. In the end, it took just eight months for the hospital foundation and others to raise $2.7 million -enough to buy a 32-slice scanner, an upgrade over the original plan to buy a 16-slice scanner.But he's also a builder in the physical sense. When Coast Reporter spoke to him on Monday, he was fixing a leak in a skylight on the roof of the Grantham's Landing home he built and lives in with his wife, Joyce.
Medical community building runs in both of their families. Joyce's grandfather was the first doctor in Gibsons, while Hubbs' father, Harvey, was the chair of the society that took St. Mary's from being a small hospital in Pender Harbour to current building, opened in Sechelt on land donated from the Sechelt Indian band in 1964. "I guess that's where I get my roots," said Hubbs. Though he's modest about his work on the Back the Cat campaign, his nomination highlights his history of being a driving force on community projects as far back as 1995, when he moved to the Coast from Surrey. Upon retiring in 1997, volunteering became his passion -though he tempers the year-round hard work with an annual summer trip with Joyce to visit their daughter Pamela in Whitehorse.
Hubbs was nominated for the award by Don Basham, chair of the Sunshine Coast Community Foundation -a group Hubbs was the founding chair of in 2004.
As vice-president and manager of a Surrey TD Bank branch in the 1990s, Hubbs also volunteered as an economic advisor to the City of Surrey, and chaired a committee who successfully lobbied to extend the Skytrain line further south into the city. Once Hubbs arrived on the Coast, he became treasurer for the Gibsons and Area Community Centre Society (GACCS), and later a treasurer for the hospital foundation. He has also been a board member with Community Futures and chaired the Gibsons Library Board.
Letters from the Sunshine Coast Regional District, the District of Sechelt, the Town of Gibsons and from Dr. Ed Berinstein, medical director of St. Mary's Hospital, supported Hubbs' nomination. He'll receive his award in Victoria on April 23.
