Each month, we profile someone connected to CBRC, featuring them in The Update, our monthly newsletter. Check out the August 2025 newsletter here.
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Ricky Rodrigues’s path to CBRC is a long and winding one. As Associate Director, Reporting and Evaluation, Ricky (he/him) brings a wealth of diverse experiences to the role—all rooted in his early days working in queer and trans community building and advocacy.
“I came out at 14, at the end of my first year of high school,” he says. “It was a big transition. I was really shy before, but coming out gave me a lot of confidence.” Ricky’s newfound self-assurance set him on a path of activism and engagement. He started a Gay-Straight Alliance at his Catholic high school, and volunteered with Planned Parenthood Toronto to educate peers about homophobia. This led to more work with queer and trans students at the University of Toronto, and eventually with ACT (the AIDS Committee of Toronto).
“There was something about queer advocacy that fuelled me, and I wanted to do more of it.”
Through ACT, Ricky participated in, and later worked for, the Totally Outright community health leadership program. This inspired Ricky to pursue a career in social work. At first, he thought he would stick with counselling work, but later he found himself more drawn to research and policy. In October 2020, he joined the CBRC team, first as a coordinator before moving up the ranks to become Associate Director, Reporting and Evaluation.
“Evaluation work is so important. We have increasing funder requirements for accountability, and so the amount of performance measurement work that we have to do keeps growing, and at the same time the capacity to do this work in our sector is limited.”
In his role, Ricky helps CBRC’s staff and partners to understand and address very complicated funder reporting requirements, which can significantly vary across grants. This includes helping to gather evaluation data, monitoring program activities, and helping to develop tools to effectively track and report on those activities.
“Whenever we're doing evaluation at CBRC, we try to keep two things in mind—understanding the outcomes, but also where we can improve, because although we can have great outcomes, we can also have better outcomes. Our community continues to grow and change so much with time, and so if we're not making an effort to learn about how we can improve we won't be well-situated to meet the community’s changing needs.”
Photo: Ricky Rodrigues
“The impact of well-done, effective evaluation is noticeable almost immediately. Either you're funded again or you get other grants. And if that happens, that's because you've proven to the funder with the data you've provided that the work you're doing is making a difference.”
