Kuban, Ron 1953-

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Kuban, Ron 1953-

PERSONAL:

Born 1953; married Wendy Mitchell (a social worker), 1990; children: Kaitlyn, Mitchell. Education: Royal Military College, B.A., 1975; University of Alberta, M.A., 1989, Ph.D., 1993.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Community service worker. Federal Public Service of Canada, 1983-88; Alberta's Public Service, manager, 1988-94; Pegasus Emergency Management Consortium, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, president, 1994—. Military service: Canadian Army, 1970-83, served in Australia, Canada, China, and Cyprus; became captain.

MEMBER:

Red Cross Regional Council (president of the Central/Northern Alberta chapter), Safe Guard (president), Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues (president), Edmonton Regional Crime Prevention network (president), Mill Woods President's Council (chair), Alberta Association of Police Governance (chair), Mill Woods Community Patrol (founding member).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Queen's Jubilee Medal, Alberta Government, 2004, for community service; Alberta Centenary, Alberta Government, 2005, for community service; Harry Hole Community Policing Award, Edmonton Police Foundation, 2006.

WRITINGS:

Crisis Management in Canada: A Study of Its Practice, Pendragon (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), 1995.

(Editor) The Canadian Fire Officer's Guide to Emergency Management, Pendragon (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), 1996.

Edmonton's Urban Villages: The Community League Movement, University of Alberta Press (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), 2005.

Served for two years as editor of the Canadian Journal of Emergency Management.

SIDELIGHTS:

Ron Kuban is a Canadian community service worker. In 1970 he joined the Canadian Army and served in Australia, Canada, China, and, with the United Nations, in Cyprus. After leaving the military in 1983, he worked a number of community-centered jobs in Canada and earned a Ph.D. Settling in Edmonton, Alberta, in western Canada, Kuban eventually became president of Pegasus Emergency Management Consortium.

Kuban published Crisis Management in Canada: A Study of Its Practice in 1995. This book originated as Kuban's doctoral thesis. In it he makes comparisons between emergency responses and practices across Canada on regular, day-to-day events and the response elicited during a government-declared crisis. Kuban recorded his information from personal research as well as feedback from emergency response teams.

The following year Kuban edited The Canadian Fire Officer's Guide to Emergency Management. The book also takes a look at emergency response teams, but does so on a community level. The book is written for local emergency response teams in Canada and details techniques, firsthand accounts, and other useful information for those teams. Stories included in the book come from fire officers and other emergency response experts.

In 2005 Kuban published Edmonton's Urban Villages: The Community League Movement. The book highlights Kuban's decades-worth of knowledge of the community league movement in Edmonton through his explanations of the league and its history. He outlines how Edmonton grew from a prairie town to a metropolis and the significant role community groups played in its growth, shaping, and development. The book is divided into chapters based on chronological periods of the city's history, including during World War II, the oil boom that followed the war, the growth from domestic and international immigrants, and its public reinvention from a rural town to an urban center, one of Canada's most significant cities. Kuban also looks ahead at the measures the local government and its inhabitants have put in place with an eye towards the future of their city. Kuban also clarifies the history of Edmonton's community leagues, from the concept's origins in several eastern cities in the United States to Edmonton's first community association in 1917. He highlights the growth of the community groups across the city, noting that by 1934, the city already boasted twenty-one leagues. Kuban then delineates what the leagues did for the city, including pushing for sports and recreational facilities and leagues in the city, creation of bus routes, better city sanitation, setting up gambling ordinances, adding sidewalks and street lights, and incorporating a trolley network in the city. James Lightbody, writing in the Canadian Journal of Urban Research, commented that "Edmonton's Urban Villages can be read as an interesting snippet of local social history and an uneasy combination of Horatio Alger stories and Sarah Binks." Lightbody concluded that the book "is a homage to the many thousands of citizens who, through their energetic volunteerism, organizational efforts, and unrelenting fund-raising, made Edmonton an adequate community in which to live." Lightbody added: "While not a compulsively readable book it does merit a passing browse."