After moving to Kingston to oversee a then struggling United Way, Bhavana Varma transformed agency into one of the country’s leading models for fundraising
Longtime United Way president and CEO Bhavana Varma. Photo by Bernard Clark /jpg, KI, apsmc
If not for her husband’s spirit of adventure, Kingston may never have been blessed by the presence of Bhavana Varma.
Presence is far too weak a word. In fact, even stronger words such as impact or influence or presence wouldn’t do justice to the mark the longtime United Way KFL&A president and CEO has made in the community, and beyond.
That Varma even landed in Kingston in the first place — where the once struggling United Way was in shambles, missing financial target after financial target, year in and year out – is due to her husband, Rakesh’s, “spirit of adventure.”
“I grew up in India,” Varma said during an interview over coffee to discuss the massive legacy she’s left behind with the local United Way. “I was born there and raised there and studied there.”
Her father was an air force pilot and her mother a doctor, which meant the family moved frequently, but always maintained a home base in Lucknow, India, where her parents came from.
Varma recalled that her parents were both the giving kind, but charity in India was nothing like it is in North America, specifically Canada.
“We didn’t have something like United Way,” she said. “(Charity in India) was really helping people around you.”
She recalled the first time she herself felt the call to help others. The family went off the military base to see a movie at the theatre. On the trip, Varma said, she got what she really remembers as her first exposure to the suffering some were experiencing in India.
“India has so much poverty, but I had never seen poverty till that day,” she said. “We came out of the movie, and I saw all these kids and these families on the streets, and it just broke my heart. I cried.”
In the car, the crying continued, she said, recalling her mother asking what was wrong and fearing that the movie had been too much for their young daughter.
“My mom kept saying ‘It’s the movie, she’s too young, we shouldn’t have taken her,’” Varma said. “And when we got home, my dad asked, ‘What was the matter?’ and I said ‘It’s all these people, we have to do something. What can we do?’ ”
That day, her father told her something that she’s carry with her for the rest of her life.
“He told me ‘You can’t change the world yourself, but every day do something for someone, and it’ll make you feel better,’ ” she said. “And that’s what I did, every day.”
But it somehow never felt like enough.
Varma worked at hotels in India, as well as at a school, but after she married her husband, Rakesh, he convinced her there was a whole big world out there to explore.
She came to Canada “kicking and screaming,” Varma said. “We moved to Hamilton. We got the bus from Toronto, we didn’t know a soul except for one of Rakesh’s friends from school so we took the bus from Toronto airport to Hamilton, concrete all the way… it was like ‘Where have you brought me? The first day someone was yelling on the street at us to go back home. It was like, ‘Oh no, this is a mean country, too.’ It was horrible.”
Initially, Varma said she wanted to leave.
“I hated it, and I was ready to go back (home),” she said.” I was so mad at him for bringing him here. I couldn’t get a job. I was an immigrant, we got our papers ready quickly, so we hadn’t done the research to figure out there was a recession at the time. There were no jobs, I was considered a new worker, which meant that nothing I had done in my life mattered before this. I had no Canadian credentials, no Canadian degree.”
Her husband, meanwhile, had a degree from McMaster University and was one of only 30 people the world over to be accepted into an exclusive program at McMaster.
“That was okay for him, but I couldn’t find any work,” Varma recalled. “He loves to study, so he was going to do his fourth degree. And he was in this very exclusive program at McMaster that only 30 people across the world had gotten into and he was all set. And I said ‘Well, if you want me to stay, you’d better find a job because this is not going to work with you, the teaching assistant salary is not enough to keep us going, I’ve got to find a job.”
A friend of hers told her to suck it up and get some Canadian employment experience.
“So, I signed up with Canadian temporary services, which was just like manpower, and I started typing receipts. Her first assignment was to work for, go figure, the United Way.
“It was a three-month contract to type receipts, 500 receipts a day on this old, archaic IBM typewriter with carbon paper,” she said. “I was, again, cursing my fate for having been dragged over to this country and here I was typing receipts and hated it.”
It took precisely 48 hours, Varma said, for the United Way to open her eyes.
“I looked around and said ‘Oh, my God, this is the United Way, it’s so brilliant, why didn’t we have this in India? And that was it. I went to the boss, and I said, ‘I’m going to stay,’ and he said, ‘I don’t have a job,’ and I said, ‘Find me one because I’m not going anywhere.’ ”
Six months after arriving in Canada, Varma’s husband gave up his academic pursuit in Hamilton so his wife could join the United Way in nearby St. Catharines.
“I did whatever they would let me do,” she said. “I rose through the ranks, and I was (in St. Catharines) for six and a half years.”
At that time, the United Way in Kingston was limping along badly.
“This United Way was dying,” Varma said. “The national office had come in by then and they suggested that I apply for the job.”
She initially declined, because she loved it at the St. Catharines organization, where she was director of fundraising.
“I thought I was the cat’s whiskers, and we were doing well,” she said. But the national office insisted. “They said ‘No, we really need you to apply.’ So, a few of us United Way people applied, and they offered me the job.
When she told her husband about the opportunity, he was more than supportive, she said.
“He said ‘You like helping people, don’t you?’ They need a lot of help.”
So, in 1999, Varma accepted the position in Kingston with its United Way and headed east, where her life would be forever altered.
“It was a mess,” she recalled of the situation the Kingston organization faced. “There was a new board that had come in, my predecessor had left, the staff hadn’t raised goal for years. We were struggling. The agencies were mad with us.”
Varma leaned into what initially drew her into the United Way while she waded through the minefield of woes surrounding the Kingston organization.
“The beauty of the United Way, I felt, and feel, is you’re helping people you don’t even know,” she said. “In India, you don’t have that organized method. You try to help everyone individually, you help the people around you. But this was an organized way. In India, if you don’t have food, you’re hungry. There’s no organized way to get food, there’s no organized way to get clothes. It’s literally individual charity.”
That lit a fire within her, one that burns brightly even still.
But Varma knew what she was walking into in Kingston.
“I had never been the CEO,” she said. “I had been the No. 2 in the organization. So, that was a new experience for me.”
Early on, after a particularly grueling day, her parents were visiting from India and she was explaining the situation she faced, when her father imparted more of his advice on her, something he did many times, Varma said.
“My dad gave me great feedback over the years,” she said. “He said ‘They’ve hired you to make a decision, you make the wrong decision, then they’ll fie you, but you have to make a decision.’ And that was brilliant because that’s basically what a leader does, right? Make decisions based on the best information you have. So that was the start, that was learn as a leader. The other one was just making relations, building relationships with the community that had that lost their faith in the United Way of being a social service leader.”
Early into her tenure in Kingston, Varma learned that being a good leader means staying grounded, she said.
One of the things that I’ve always believed in is leading with humility and that stayed with me to this day,” she said. “You have to be humble when you are affecting change. There were so many people willing to help, it was really helping find ways that they could help and really make sure they understood that this was their United Way and what can we do as the United Way – it’s not the staff’s United Way, it’s not the board’s, it’s the community’s United Way. So, what can we, as workers of the United Way, do to facilitate that. What do you want us to do? How can we help your community? And I think that was a shift.”
It wasn’t without its lumps, especially initially, Varma said.
She recalled her first TV news interview with CKWS’s Carol Bond, on her first day on the job with the KFL&A United Way.
“She called and said, ‘I’d like to interview you,’ and I thought ‘Oh, what a welcoming community.’ So I arrived all set for the interview, literally the first day on the job, and she turned around and asked, ‘What are you going to do with the financial mess?’ And I thought ‘Oh my gosh, I thought you were going to be nice to me,’ ” Varma recalled with a chuckle.
To that point, the agency had been struggling to make targets of less than $1.5 million. In her first year in Kingston, Varma and the agency met target, something they achieved and toppled year in and year out in her two-plus decades at the helm.
“We figured it out,” she said. “We had a great board; a really fabulous board and we turned it around.”
She also came to Kingston armed with the experience she’d gained in St. Catharines.
“Coming up through the ranks, you learn everything,” Varma said. “I learned fundraising, I learned finance, I learned all the ins and outs of data and how to manage volunteers because we are so reliant on volunteers. So that was the fun part, being able to implement all that I’d learned over the years. And we are now one of the top United Ways in the country.”
It started with rebuilding trust and making the right connections.
“We met with (longtime Whig-Standard publisher) Fred LaFlamme and (Whig photo editor and columnist) Jack Chiang,” Varma said.
Varma and the campaign board chair met with the Whig brass to ask them to be co-chairs for the campaign, which they politely declined.
“They said you don’t want us,” she said. “You want the mayor, because the mayor stands for trust.”
Chiang made one call, Varma said, and then Kingston mayor Gary Bennett agreed to chair the campaign.
“They had such a trust relationship, he said sure,” she recalled. “That was the start because he could recruit the leaders we needed. He recruited Glenn Wood from DuPont, he recruited Bill Leggett from Queen’s, all the leaders came aboard and once you get that kind of credibility, then it was my job and we raised goal for the first time in so many years.”
With the people in place, Varma had to turn her focus on fixing the fractured relationship between the United Way and the agencies it supported.
“We also had to rebuild trust,” she said. “The agencies were quite mad at the United Way, and rightfully so. They didn’t feel that they had been treated well, with respect and everything else.
Every month, they meet as a group, and Varma can still recall how tough those initial meetings were.
“They were so mean to me,” she said “That was the only time I actually cried.”
When she’d finally had enough, Varma had what she described as a meltdown, standing her ground with the agencies.
“It was like ‘I’ve done nothing to hurt you,’ she recalled. “I’d been open and communicated so finally I just had a meltdown and I said, enough, we’ve been doing everything right, we’ve communicated with you, and they turned around completely. And since then, it’s been a journey together. The agencies are the most amazing things that we have in our community.”
Looking back, Varma has nothing but fond memories of her time, noting that when she arrived in Kingston, she was one of four and a half employees the agency employed, a number that has quadrupled in the two decades since.
And the volunteers … oh the volunteers. They are the lifeblood of the agency, she said.
“We pride ourselves in a low-cost ratio,” she said. “But the volunteers, we have thousands of volunteers, and that is what’s amazing. That’s what actually makes the United Way so special, it’s all of these volunteers and as a leader, you have access to this amazing brainpower, the wisdom of all these people around, it’s hard to make a wrong decision when you’re surrounded by these amazing people who are passionate and committed to making a difference.”
Thanks to that collaboration, one significant United Way initiative came to be that proved both creative and powerful when it came to fundraising.
“The Kingston Pen tours,” Varma explained, was the idea of Lori MacDonald, the regional deputy commissioner for Correctional Services Canada, who was the campaign chair at the time in 2013. “She said, ‘Would you like to do these tours?’ So, we started the tours.”
Unbelievably, the tours weren’t the tourism goliath they are now at the time. In fact, Varma said, it wasn’t until the Whig-Standard published a story on the tours that they became popular. Insanely popular, she added.
The agency benefited from the tours for years until the City of Kingston took them over and continues to offer them to this day.
As the United Way grew and grew and eventually emerged as the top fundraising campaign in Kingston year over year, all under Varma’s guiding hand, the credit for its revival naturally was pointed toward the CEO, credit Varma said she was never comfortable with.
“Believe it or not, I’m a very private person,” she said. In St. Catharines, the United Way didn’t have the same profile, but when I came to Kingston, people were watching the United Way so closely that I had to give up some of that privacy to say, yeah, this is part of the job. So I hope that over the years I’ve always deflected that praise because there is not one person who does it. It’s the thousands of volunteers, the staff, the agencies. It’s a team effort.”
Along with the praise, Varma acknowledges that she also encountered her fair share of detractors, and difficult decisions.
“One thing that’s been tough along the way is worrying about how you’re coming across,” she said. “I’m a woman, the first woman in this role. I’m not white, in a city that at that time was a three percent visible minority. I have had my fair share of people think I’m this tough, go-getting person, which is so not me. I can make tough decisions, but that doesn’t mean I’m tough. It hurts inside when you make some decisions, but you just have to do what’s right for the United Way always. That’s what I lived and breathed every single moment.”
The result of the ups, downs and everything in between, at the end of the day, was results, Varma said. Her final campaign last year as leader saw the agency raise just shy of $4 million. Under Varma’s guidance, the United Way in the Kingston region, the campaigns raised more than $70 million, not including Kingston Pen tours, grants and endowments.
To this day, Varma said she is most proud of how the community responded to the United Way over her time in Kingston, and with the work United Way did to combat youth homelessness.
“It was a passion project,” she said.
The 2023 campaign marked her final chapter in a storied, downright legendary tenure. It was a decision, she said, that had been years in the making.
“Before the pandemic, I started thinking about what I want to do with the rest of my life,” Varma said. “I brought the United Way up to this wonderful spot. And then the pandemic hit and I’m glad I didn’t make the decision before the pandemic because the pandemic counted on trust relationships to get through. And we did right as a community, but it was a lot. After the pandemic, when I went back to that thought of what do I want to do with the rest of my life, I said, is this pandemic burnout, which was happening a lot, or is this something that I need to do for myself? I thought a lot about it and felt like this was the right time.”
Without much fanfare, similar to her arrival some 25 years ago, Varma stepped away from the United Way.
“Everyone had said you’ll know when it’s the right time,” she said. “The United Way was stable, our staffing was great, the board had been after me about succession planning, which we’d done. It was nice to leave it on this high, to continue the legacy that was created by all these volunteers. It just felt like the right time.”
These days, she finds herself coaching leadership skills, the skills she used and leaned on for the last two-plus decades.
“I do a lot of pro bono leadership coaching for our nonprofit’s amazing leaders,” she said. “They can’t afford it. In the corporate world, executive coaching is a big thing. In our nonprofits, who need it so much, it’s not. So most of my coachings are nonprofit leaders who I don’t charge. I volunteer and I do some consulting. The nice part is I’m able to help agencies with strategic planning, with fundraising plans, with operational guidance.”
Varma admitted she’d be lying if she said it wasn’t hard to let go of the United Way role after having done it for roughly half of her life.
“It is always hard to let go,” she said. “But I’m confident in our volunteers and the board and the staff. They’ll do the right thing. Everyone’s style is different. I have confidence. I built the foundation, so now it’s up to them to take it.”
Asked what her legacy is, Varma paused, before answering.
“I just think helping people understand that the United Way is their United Way,” she said. “This is a community entity, and the model is beautiful, it’s autonomous. It’s not like some head office is telling us what to do. Yes, you have to follow certain guidelines and membership agreements, but at the end of the day, it’s the community. What are the needs of our community? And our community needs are different from Toronto or Winnipeg. How do we deal with our needs as a community? And how do we give people the pride in knowing that they can make a difference. We all grow up wanting to make a difference in the world. All of us. Everyone comes to this world saying, how am I going to make a difference in this world? And here I’ve had it. Such a privilege.”
Before she walked out the door completely, however, Varma did make sure to right one wrong, turning the spotlight on her husband and best friend, who she said played a central role in her ability to manage her career and flourish.
“At my retirement event, I finally thanked my husband,” she said with a laugh. “I said to him, I’m saying this right now, but you were right. Bringing me to Canada was the best thing you did. It took me 30 years to say that.”
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