Rankin MacSween is a community-builder, an author, a farmer, a husband, a father, and a life-long learner.

He is best known for his career as President and CEO of New Dawn Enterprises, Canada’s oldest community development corporation. He retired from that position in January 2021 after serving forty-one years with New Dawn.

Under his leadership, New Dawn grew from a small, volunteer-run organization into an internationally recognized social enterprise that now employs over 150 people and serves more than 600 Cape Bretoners each day through its projects and businesses that address community needs, including affordable and supportive housing, immigration and newcomer settlement support, senior care, and food security.

Through this work, Rankin came to see that community challenges are rooted in politics, culture, and history as much as economics and that solutions must be rooted in healing and community-building as much as economic development.

In the 2012 and 2016 municipal elections, MacSween put his name forward for CBRM’s mayoral race. Both bids were unsuccessful but provided a platform to address the issues he saw as most important to the community, including addressing the high child poverty rate, improving municipal infrastructure and services, and attracting newcomers.

During his career, he served as a member of the ONE Nova Scotia Coalition, Chair of Laurentian Energy Corporation, a Founding Director of Island Community Justice, and Chair of the Cape Breton Branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association. He continues to belong to the Canadian Community Economic Development Network, of which he is a founding member.

He holds degrees from St. Francis Xavier University, the University of Ottawa, the Merrill Palmer Institute, a PhD from the University of Toronto and an honorary doctorate from Cape Breton University. In 2008 was inducted into the Cape Breton Business Hall of Fame.

More recently, MacSween authored his first book, The Search for a New Way: The Story of New Dawn Enterprises, which was published by Nimbus Publishing in 2022. An audiobook version is soon to be released.

He lives with his wife, Marie, in Boisdale on land that has been in his family for five generations.