Paul Larocque on Building a Better Future by Bringing Arts Education to Young Learners

If there were a blueprint for bringing purpose to a career, it might look a lot like Paul Larocque.

Among his many projects since taking the helm as President & CEO of Arts Umbrella in 2016, the 2025 Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) Honorary Degree recipient has overseen the organization’s move into a new, 50,000 square-foot space on Granville Island (a building which was once part of the former ECU campus).

The multimillion-dollar renovation brought six new dance studios, four theatre, music and film studios, 10 art and design studios and a 132-seat theatre and exhibition space to the non-profit charitable organization, significantly increasing its capacity to serve its thousands of students.

He has helped establish new partnerships, programs and scholarships for Arts Umbrella students, and stewarded longstanding relationships with organizations such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ronald McDonald House, Electronic Arts, Covenant House and BC Children’s Hospital. And in 2019, Arts Umbrella launched Connected North in partnership with TakingITGlobal to bring high-quality arts education to youth in remote and underserved communities.

Arts Umbrella reaches more than three-quarters of its students through programming delivered outside its flagship Granville Island arts centre. This visionary educational diversity has seen the non-profit grow from 45 students in 1979 to an interdisciplinary educational hub whose more than 200 faculty members mentor 20,000 students each year across BC as well as in Nunavut, the Yukon, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.

An accomplished culture worker outside his work with Arts Umbrella, Paul also previously served as Associate Director at the Vancouver Art Gallery for more than a decade, where his portfolio included administration, fundraising, government relations, strategic planning, education and the gallery’s relocation efforts. And he is an active member of Vancouver’s cultural community, serving on various boards, including Chor Leoni Men’s Choir and Granville Island Council, and as a volunteer with the Loran Scholars Foundation and the McCall MacBain Foundation.

But beyond his estimable professional achievements, Paul is distinguished by something rarer: he is a true believer.

“I feel like I am a part of a very critical ecosystem. In every community, I feel that arts and culture is at its core,” Paul says. Cultural expression, he continues, is “the way in which we can help define our identities as a city or a country or a community.

“At Arts Umbrella, our mission is to provide profound life experiences to children and youth through arts education … It’s really about investing in the next generation. And we know through many studies and much research that arts education, particularly in the lives of young people, has profound impacts, including developing compassion and empathy.”

For Paul, this is a conviction born not only of professional experience but personal experience as well. A longtime performer who studied piano at the Royal Conservatory, Paul says art has always been a cornerstone of his own sense of fulfilment and purpose.

“When I was young, I found a lot of confidence in having the arts in my life. It was a way in which to express myself,” he says, adding this is why he tells young artists “to keep telling their stories because they’re so powerful and mean so much to everyone in our many communities across this country.”

Hear more from Paul in our feature video interview on ECU’s YouTube channel. Find interviews with the rest of our 2025 honorary degree recipients alongside all the videos from this year’s grad events on our ECU Graduation playlist.