Every family has an origin story, and Stephanie Felesky’s begins with a wartime flight log. Her father, Roy Baker, was training to be an engineer when the Second World War called him into the Commonwealth Air Training Command, and he spent part of his service stationed across Alberta and Saskatchewan. When peace came, he finished his engineering degree, married Stephanie’s mother Joyce, and by 1950 had moved the young family from Toronto to a booming postwar Calgary. Stephanie Louise Felesky was born in Toronto on January 28, 1947, but Calgary is where she grew into the woman who would spend the next several decades building the city’s social fabric.
A Childhood That Pointed Toward Service
Stephanie grew up in St. Andrews Heights, close enough to watch the University of Calgary and Foothills Hospital rise from the prairie. Her parents modeled community involvement at the dinner table, debating current events over supper, and a social studies teacher nurtured her budding interest in civil rights. As a teenager too young to formally register as a delegate for a Canadian Council of Christians and Jews civil rights meeting, she talked her way into a job running the lemonade stand just so she could sit in the room and listen. She has joked since that she has been making lemonade ever since, a line that captures her lifelong instinct for finding a way in when the front door is closed.
She met her future husband, Brian Felesky, at a summer party, and the two married within the year. Stephanie went on to earn a degree in education, with distinction, from the University of Calgary. What followed was two intertwined careers, as Stephanie and Brian became fixtures of Calgary’s non-profit and philanthropic circles, most notably through decades of work with the United Way, where they became the first married couple ever asked to co-chair the annual campaign.
Building a Safety Net for a Growing City
Stephanie’s committee work with the United Way exposed her directly to the scale of homelessness in Calgary, and in 1997 she partnered with fellow Alberta Order of Excellence member Art Smith to found the Calgary Homeless Foundation, an organization built to coordinate non-profits, churches, government and police under a single strategy. That instinct for bringing disparate groups to the same table became a hallmark of her career. In 2012 she helped launch the RESOLVE campaign, which spent six years raising money for low-cost housing, and in 2018 she was a founding member of the Calgary Affordable Housing Foundation, an organization she has described as a permanent version of RESOLVE.
Her civic work extended into policing as well. Stephanie served ten years on the Calgary Police Commission after being asked to submit her name in 2006, and in 2014 she helped establish the Calgary Police Youth Foundation, an organization she notes is the only police foundation in the country with such a deliberate focus on kids. She also co-chaired a capital campaign that raised millions to expand the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Foothills Hospital, the same hospital she used to skate past as a child on the slough that once occupied its site.
A Career Recognized From Ottawa to Calgary
Beyond her non-profit work, Stephanie has sat on the corporate boards of Canexus Limited, Star Choice Communications and Canada Lands Company Limited, and earned her ICD.D designation from the Institute of Corporate Directors in 2005. Her honours include membership in the Order of Canada in 2004, an honorary degree from the University of Calgary in 2009, and a string of Jubilee and Coronation medals culminating in the King Charles III Coronation Medal in 2025. According to her official Alberta Order of Excellence profile, she was inducted into the Order in 2025 for a lifetime of building stronger, safer, more affordable Calgary neighbourhoods.
Stephanie is the mother of three and grandmother of six, and she still describes her philanthropy in plain, practical terms. She has said that people mistakenly believe they need deep pockets to help their community, when in fact time and passion count just as much as a cheque. Every charity needs time, talent and treasure, she likes to say, and contributing even one of the three can make a real difference.
What would Calgary’s non-profit sector look like today without the steady persistence of volunteers like Stephanie Felesky?
