For Marilyn Horrick, success means helping others to ‘prosper and be contributors to a thriving society’

As Marilyn Horrick, BA 91, was completing high school in Toronto in 1988, she envisioned Montreal as her next port of call.

A Montreal native, she had moved to Ontario because her father’s employer, a large insurance brokerage, had changed headquarters.

“Even though Toronto has now become my home and has been for decades, I found it difficult to leave Montreal as a child,” says Horrick. “At one point, I decided I would create a future for myself that would always include the province of Quebec.”

This resolution factored into her decision to enrol in Concordia’s Department of Communication Studies.

Her subsequent undergraduate experience was an enjoyable challenge that helped her to build valuable transferable skills. It was also a chance to reconnect with her extended family and rekindle her love of Montreal.

“Even after graduating, every job I’ve ever had has, by design, kept me with one foot in Quebec,” Horrick says.

For instance, her first full-time employer, Zurich Insurance, hired her for a marketing position but soon promoted her to an operations role that involved liaising between teams in Montreal and Toronto in order to establish a new pan-Canadian division.

Currently, she’s the senior vice-president of market growth, brand expansion and partner relations for Desjardins. As such, she’s helping the Quebec-based financial-services co-operative to grow its brand, activities and presence in the rest of Canada.

Within its home province, Desjardins is known as a member-run institution that’s actively involved in the social and economic development of the communities it serves.

“It embodies its organizational values not only through philanthropic and social-responsibility endeavours, but also in the ways it does business,” Horrick says. “Those are both differentiating characteristics that a lot of people find appealing in a provider and employer.”

“However, outside of Quebec, it’s more widely recognized as a property and casualty insurer,” she continues. Although this is an important part of Desjardins’s value proposition, she aims to establish that there’s much more to North America’s largest financial cooperative.

For this challenge and many others, Horrick has leveraged her breadth of experience in both Ontario and Quebec. She speaks French as a second language, thanks to immersion schooling and subsequent opportunities to practice in her academic and professional life.

“Beyond the language, there’s also value in having a sense of the topics and issues that are resonating for stakeholders that live in each place,” she says. “I was fortunate to learn early on about just how unique these two provinces are and the distinct economic and cultural contributions they’ve each made to our country.”

Horrick’s own contributions don’t end with her day job. As a volunteer, she’s a board vice-chair of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and a long-time Ontario board co-chair of the Women in Insurance Cancer Crusade.

“There are only so many hours in a day,” she says. “But at the end of each day, if I know I did as much as I could to give back to the community and to help the next generation find a place for themselves where they can prosper and be contributors to a thriving society, then that’s success.”

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