Oh, what a night!

While the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Business Excellence Awards Gala is always a  good time, it’s even better when you win an award! Thank you to the Chamber for choosing WalterFedy as the winner of the Employee Engagement Award for 2023! They stated that our hybrid work philosophy, internal professional development offerings, Employee Appreciation Week,  mentorship program, and our people-first initiatives as the reasons we stood out this year.

At WalterFedy, we have been working hard to become a people-first organization. To us, people-first means spending time upfront to hire the right employees and then continuing to encourage their development while they are part of our team. 

We intentionally invest in programs that bring people together to collaborate, allow them to be their best selves, and to further enhance our skills collectively. A fully engaged team is the most productive team, and when we are all working together and moving in the same direction, we can achieve great things.

Our leaders have a huge part in moving us toward our goal of being a people-first organization. They've worked hard, put in a ton of effort to bring our people-first initiatives to life, and have invested in their teams (and themselves) to make it happen.

The biggest thank you for this award goes to our employees for actively participating in our action and ambition statements and getting involved. Engagement programs are just ideas until employees embrace them and make them part of corporate culture, and that’s what our team has done!

The Employee Engagement category was filled with fantastic organizations, and we are honoured to be chosen as the winner amongst them. Congrats to our fellow nominees for all their work in the employee engagement space: Igloo Software, Parents for Community Living, Reis Informatica, The Food Bank of Waterloo Region, Waterloo Regional Police Service, and Your Neighborhood Credit Union.

Thank you again to the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber of Commerce for such a wonderful evening.

WalterFedy group at the Chamber Gala (l to r): Garth, Ben, Elena, Matt N, Victoria, Marie, Matt W and Rob

WalterFedy was proud to support the Food Bank of Waterloo Region by participating in Canstruction for the 14th year!

This year, our team created the face of the Sphinx in a build we called A-Nile-ate Hunger. Even if you haven’t seen the Sphinx in real life, you know it’s there. The same goes for hunger in our community. Even if you haven’t experienced it, the need is now there more than ever. That is why WalterFedy supports Canstruction every year.

Our team worked on the design and logistics of the build for a few months making sure we perfected all the measurements and can choices. We are very proud of what we came up with!

Thank you to the WalterFedy team for your support through our fundraising initiatives. This year, the team delivered Candygrams and hosted a Joker’s Wild event. Their hard work paid off and they were able to raise money to support a good portion of the build.

The best part about Canstruction is that all the cans used by us and the other teams get donated to the Food Bank and to those most in need. If you’d like to see all the builds from this year and who took home the awards, you can visit the Food Bank of Waterloo Region’s Canstruction page on their website.

Canstruction Build Team: Maria, Angenie, Ridvan, Jordan, Michael, Marie, Matt and Bob

WalterFedy is happy to announce we have opened an office in Calgary – our first in Alberta.

As WalterFedy has continued to thrive in

the Ontario market, we have been looking for opportunities to expand our business into new markets across Canada. Calgary jumped out as a great option for us. We are renting space in the beautiful Stephen Avenue Place WeWork office in downtown Calgary. One reason we're so excited about being in the WeWork space is the opportunity to mingle and connect with others in Calgary daily, which will help grow our network and presence in the city. It will also give us the chance to explore the city and find the right place for permanent office space in the upcoming months.

As with all our offices, our goal is to have architects and engineers working together in the same ecosystem. This gives members of the WalterFedy team a unique perspective on projects and into the A/E/C industry while our clients reap the benefits of having architects and engineers in close quarters ready to collaborate at any time.

As architects and engineers, we recognize the crucial role in shaping the way our communities feel and function. Our ambition is to enhance the world around us. We look forward to delivering thoughtful holistic design solutions to a variety of projects, including a focus on education, food production, and the future of energy/sustainability, through our collaborative, multidisciplinary practice.

The city has a lot to offer and we are ready to meet potential clients and partners, and get to work! If you’re interested in collaborating with us or finding out more about WalterFedy, email solutions@walterfedy.com and we will get in touch.

The WalterFedy Canstruction team was hard at work on April 22 at Conestoga Mall building our Olympic-themed creation from cans called, "Win Together, Luge Together." We are so happy to announce that the cans we chose led to WalterFedy being awarded the coveted Best Meal Award from the Food Bank judges!

A big thank you to the hard-working Canstruction team for their months of hard work and dedication to bringing this build to life. Another big thank you goes out to everyone at WalterFedy/AEC who supported us in our fundraising efforts over the last two months. We couldn't have done it without you!

If you love our build and want to support the team, you can donate to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region via our Donate to Vote page - every dollar we raise on this page goes toward us winning the People's Choice Award AND stamping out hunger in the Waterloo Region. Pretty good bang for your buck!

And just like that, after seven fantastic weeks, our 70+ Acts of Good campaign has come to an end. When we set out to celebrate WalterFedy’s 70th Anniversary, we knew we had to do something that would include and benefit the community around us.

In the final three weeks, we covered a lot of ground, including purchasing 70 trees through the Grand River Conservation Authority (GRCA) to be planted in the Waterloo Region via their Give Grand program. This isn’t the first time we’ve teamed up with the GRCA and we hope to work with them again to help plant some of those trees!

After a successful run at Community Fridge KW, we connected with Community Fridges Hamilton to fill up the Beasley Fridge in Downtown Hamilton for three days. Like their Kitchener counterpart, Community Fridges Hamilton provides 24/7 low-barrier access to free food provided entirely by the community. We were happy to play a small part in filling their fridges for a week and look forward to supporting them again in the future.

We also purchased seven essential items from YWCA's wish list for their affordable and supportive housing project on Block Line. We’ve been providing project management services to this project and were happy to give back and help support a build that is so important to the Waterloo Region.

We wrapped up the campaign by delivering 401lbs of food and $915 to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region. That translates to 3,060 meals to help feed our hungry neighbours. In Hamilton, our team rallied to provide an assortment of festive gifts that will be distributed through the Good Shepherd this holiday season. 

We’re sad that the campaign is over, but after a long 2021, this was the perfect way to end the year. We might be 70, but we’re feeling spritely heading into 2022. We're looking forward to finding new and exciting ways to live out our core value of community building over the next 70 years! 

We’re halfway through our 70 Acts of Good to celebrate our 70th Anniversary and we want to tell you what we’ve been up to! We shared our full plan in a blog at the end of October and we are very excited about what we have accomplished so far.

We started by kicking off a six-week food drive in our Kitchener office for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region. We’ve been closely connected to the organization for many years through food drives and our yearly Canstruction builds, so including the Food Bank in this initiative was an easy decision. We’ve already smashed our goal of 70lbs of food and we keep adding more to our collection! We also launched a food and gift drive in support of Good Shepherd in Hamilton. We’ve supported Good Shepherd initiatives since we first arrived in Hamilton in 2015.

With a change of seasons on the horizon, we turned our attention to those most impacted by the cooler temperatures and donated the monetary equivalent of 70 pairs of socks to ToastyToes Waterloo Region. This annual program helps local shelters support our most vulnerable residents with clear, warm socks – the most requested item by people accessing their services.

We teamed up with Community Fridge KW to fill their community fridge for four days earlier in October and it was our first time being involved with this grass-roots organization. They are directly supporting those in need in our community and their new location outside of the Kitchener Market now has a pantry set up to go along with the fridge. If you’re at the Kitchener Market, please consider buying a little extra and adding it to the fridge.

Every Wednesday on our Instagram account we are hosting raffles to support local small businesses in Kitchener and Hamilton. Winners from KW win Downtown Kitchener BIA Downtown Dollars and winners from Hamilton chose businesses through the Hamilton Hometown Hub and have picked Bread Bar, Blooms Fresh, Merit Brewing and Hambrgr so far.

Last week we hosted a week-long contest for community members to nominate frontline workers to win a free lunch on us. We sent lunch to seven people who’ve worked throughout the pandemic to keep us safe and much-needed services open. Thank you to all the winners!

This week we made donations of cat food to both The Humane Society of Kitchener Waterloo and Stratford Perth and the Hamilton/Burlington SPCA. We hope there are some very happy kitties today!

We have three more weeks in our 70 Acts of Good campaign and we can’t wait to share what else we have been working on!

There is a lot more to creek design than meets the eye. When our Water Resources team was tasked with taking a Cambridge stormwater pond offline to make way for a more diverse creek ecosystem, they knew it would be a challenge. Add in the removal of a 400m stretch of road and you’ve got the makings of a really complex water resources project.

The on-line pond had been used for decades to capture runoff from the adjacent agricultural land, but had also been recommended for removal for over 20 years. When the Hunt Club Valley Estates subdivision broke ground on the old farmland around the pond, we worked with GSP Group to devise a plan to take the pond offline and create a more cohesive environment for the wildlife in the area. Also important was restoring the coldwater characteristics of the creek, which had been negatively impacted by the existing pond. We worked closely with the Grand River Conservation Authority to ensure our plan allocated enough land for enhancements, restoration, and floodplain.

Removing the pond meant the existing fish habitat was lost so our Water Resources team restored a wetland area in another portion of the site to ensure an equivalent habitat was reintroduced. A 400m stretch of Briardean Road bisected the wetland and, to restore the wetland into a single contiguous feature, that portion of Briardean Road was removed. “Proposing the removal of a section of road isn’t something we regularly do, but in this case, it was what was best for the wetland,” says Brian Verspagen, leader of our Water Resources team. “Excavating out the road made it possible for us to turn the whole area back into a unified wetland habitat and reconnect Middle Creek so it could stay connected with the Speed River.”

With the road out of the way and the two sides of the wetland reconnected, the next major component of the project was the restoration of Middle Creek through the former farm pond. “We had to design a path for the creek to get from one end to the other without the pond in the middle, while also navigating a 1.5-metre change in elevation,” says Brian. “Instead of doing a 1.5-metre drop in one spot with a waterfall, which would make it impossible for fish to migrate up the creek, our team introduced a series of meanders (bends) with pools and riffles changing the grade of the creek just six inches at a time.” By studying the types of fish that would commonly live in this creek, the team knew the fish would have a spurt speed that could handle a six-inch incline over a two-metre distance if they had adequate rest time in a pool afterward.

The pool and riffle sequence also had an additional design advantage. “Middle Creek is a cold-water creek, which is quite rare for the area, so keeping the temperature of the creek down was important,” says Brian. “Running in and out of the shallow pond had been warming up the creek water, making it difficult for aquatic life to thrive. Each riffle section oxygenates the water, causing evaporation. The energy the water uses to change state from a fluid to a vapour cools it.” This means even if the water warms up in the pool sections, it can cool down half a degree when it passes over a riffle, rebalancing the water temperature.

Within the pools, the team introduced areas that would enable the fish to breed and safely create nests for their eggs and fry. These spaces included fallen trees and root wads that would protect the fish from predators like raccoons, while also shading them from the sun. Overflow ponds were also introduced, creating the perfect habitat for the many frogs that live in the area.

This project has revitalized an underused ecosystem and breathed new aquatic life into the area for the whole neighbourhood to enjoy.

Engineering has always been about choices for Rushin Khakharia. Growing up in Tanzania, Rushin was surrounded by a family of medical professionals, but he knew early on that wasn’t the occupation for him. Rushin broke the family mould by declaring he wanted to be an engineer, and from then on, it was just a matter of choosing how to achieve his goal. While completing an International Baccalaureate diploma program in India, he set his sights on pursuing post-secondary education even further from his home in Tanzania and applied to universities around the globe.

“I hadn’t decided on the type of engineering I wanted to do prior to applying to university, so I applied to and received acceptances for a few different programs in a few different countries,” says Rushin. The choices were plentiful. Rushin’s strength in academics earned him offers from prestigious institutions like University College in London. When it came time to make a decision, he chose Civil Engineering at the University of Waterloo. “I was leaving everything behind in Tanzania and Canada seemed like the country that would be the best for me during and after university,” he says.

While at UW, Rushin intended on completing his co-op terms at six different companies to test out as many industries as he could. On his fourth co-op term, he came to WalterFedy. “I enjoyed the consulting side of the business and that made me want to come back for a second placement because I knew I wasn’t done learning,” he says. “During my second placement at WalterFedy, I was part of a large Public-Private Partnership (P3) project team for the redevelopment at Joseph Brant Hospital. The opportunity to continue working on that project is what made me choose to come back a third time. I was given real responsibility and gained valuable experience during my co-op terms which made my choice to return to WalterFedy an easy one.”

When WalterFedy’s new CEO, Garth Cressman, started his career at WalterFedy as a 24-year-old Engineer-in-Training, he would never have predicted he’d be named the CEO before his 40th birthday. As with any good coming-of-age story, this one started with him running away from home.

After three years with WalterFedy, Garth left the firm in 2007 to take a crack at the construction business. For the next seven years, he soaked up all the knowledge he could at a local construction company. He worked his way up the corporate ladder from a project manager to the Vice President of Operations, and then an owner. His quest for knowledge never ceased and he used every opportunity to learn more about the industry and running a business.

While he was away, Garth continued to keep his eye on WalterFedy (even working with our firm on a few projects) and always had a feeling he hadn’t finished his story here. In 2014, when the opportunity to start a new energy management business unit came up, Garth jumped at the chance to return. He had just completed his MBA and was eager to try his hand at a little entrepreneurship.

“In those early days, there were only three of us, but we were hungry,” he reminisces. “We would meet new clients, identify their needs, and if it fell outside of our scope we would get together and figure out how to deliver them. We worked hard, made mistakes, pivoted our direction when needed, and in the end, we created a successful new business offering for WalterFedy.”

Two years after starting the energy management group, Garth was presented with his next challenge: leading the entire Engineering Services (ES) group at WalterFedy. This was a tall order, but he was ready to dig in. “We had created a profitable group from the ground up and when I was offered the leadership role for ES, I knew it was the right time for me to take on something bigger,” he says. “The entire experience with energy management gave me valuable insight into how to build and lead a successful team and I was able to bring those skills forward into my new position.”

Once he took the reigns of the ES department, Garth focused his team on expanding relationships with current clients and building new ones with potential clients. “Good client relationships are the foundation of successful businesses, and I wanted to make sure we had enough blocks beneath us to continue our upward momentum,” he says. Under his leadership, the ES group set out to expand their business by 85% in five years by gaining new business. It was an aggressive target, but by putting the right people in the right positions and empowering his staff to be exploratory and take calculated risks, they achieved their growth targets in just three short years. “Accomplishing that goal two years before planned is one of my biggest career achievements as a leader,” he states.

The Garth of today is just as ready to roll up his sleeves and get to work. In his new position as CEO, Garth has a clear vision of the firm’s future, and the sky is the limit. “My job is to lead a talented group of professionals toward an exciting new vision for this firm,” he says. “I want to help WalterFedy and AEC [our sister company] realize our full potential. We are at our best when we work collaboratively across disciplines and I want us to focus more on that. This is a great company and I am invested in making sure we achieve everything we’re capable of and more.”

While we couldn’t all be together this year, that didn’t stop WalterFedy and AEC from celebrating Employee Appreciation Week! To kickstart the celebrations, staff received boxes with a few symbolic gifts that aligned with our company’s new vision and direction. The boxes contained a notebook branded with our new Action Statement, a handwritten thank you card from their leader, a pair of bold custom branded socks, snacks to fuel their big ideas, and one intangible, big-picture item.

Every year around this time, we usually offer up a selection of branded company wearables for staff. This year, however, we decided to look beyond our four walls and choose a gift with greater impact. In line with our new aspiration to use our work to enhance the world around us, we purchased enough carbon offsets to counter our 2019 GHG emissions of 371 tonnes eCO2. This amount includes all our staff’s commuting and work travel, as well as keeping our lights on and building heated. Our contribution will fund two projects in the province focused on maintaining the function and diversity of ecosystems along the Niagara escarpment and re-establishing forest species.

But that wasn’t all we had in store. We couldn’t have an Employee Appreciation Week without prizes! We had a long list of prizes for our daily winners to choose from including fitness trackers, local brewery packages, cordless headphones, and so much more!

To close out the week, we hosted a big COVID-friendly event that got us all out of the or house to enjoy some time together. On October 8, the company organized a trip to Bingemans drive-in to see Yesterday. Complete with all the best movie snacks, employees watched the movie from the comfort of their cars and safely within their own bubbles.

It’s a challenging time to celebrate our teams, but we’ve adapted to make sure our people know we value their contributions and resilience in what has been a most unusual year. Thank you to all our employees for everything you do day in and day out.