Colleagues are remembering Colleen O’Neill – longtime executive director for the Canadian Publishers’ Council’s higher education and trade publishing groups – as an energetic facilitator with a sharp sense of humour.

O’Neill, who died on April 4 after living with cancer for more than 10 years, began working for the CPC in 1995. Former John Wiley & Sons Canada president Diane Wood praised O’Neill’s ability to coordinate the higher-education publishers represented on the council.

“That job is a bit of cat herding,” says Wood. “She could get everyone together and in line and focused. She did it because she was smart and had a terrific sense of humour, and did not suffer fools easily.”

Simon & Schuster Canada vice-president of sales and marketing David Millar, who serves on the CPC’s board of directors and as a member of the trade group, remembers O’Neill as being “very useful and collaborative in what we were trying to do as an industry and always trying to build a good consensus.” Millar says that during the eight years he worked with O’Neill, she stayed on top of the pressing issues, “whether [it was] pricing or the statistics we need to understand our businesses better.”

Wiley Canada general manager Maureen Talty says that as higher-education executive director, O’Neill often had to juggle competing interests from student groups, politicians, bookstores, and publishers. In particular, Talty was impressed with how O’Neill became an advocate for students.

“She really fought hard to bring them in and have their perspective or voices heard, or be in front of the students and have an open relationship,” says Talty. “She was the master of influence without authority.”

“She did a lot of good building bridges with students,” says Jacqueline Hushion, CPC’s executive director of external relations. “She was a really, really good lateral thinker, able to stitch together pieces of programming and strategy to make things work. And she was always really good at market research – at driving and directing it.”

Beyond her work on the council, O’Neill was a passionate volunteer, both within the publishing community and elsewhere. From 2000 to 2008, she held the unpaid position of executive director for Word on the Street Canada. More recently, she volunteered as a board member for the National Reading Campaign. “It took no time at all before she was completely involved in all aspects of the NRC,” says Hushion. “Her departure is going to leave a great big hole. She brought the capability, the sensitivity, the humanity, the fun, the laughter, and the energy.”