One Tuesday evening last November, a group of ambitious people from varying professional backgrounds came together for a regular meeting of something called the Emerging Leaders Network. It took place on College Street, in the building that houses the MaRS project—a not-for-profit corporation whose raison d’être is cross-pollination of public and private sector leaders, of technology and science research, and bold, homegrown business ideas. So this group, with its brainy buzz and hungry plans for civic improvement, was the perfect fit. There were corporate and non-profit types, social planners, architects, lawyers and academics mulling over ideas on how to build a better city. “I want to hijack the planning process,” announced one woman forthrightly. There was an amiable but firm facilitator moving the process along, and at different times idealism, sharp focus, pragmatism and even wistfulness (“Where is our Spadina Expressway issue?”) held sway. It felt like a cross between a policy wonk session, a networking event and let’s overthrow city hall, shall we?

The chair of the meeting was David Pecaut, the catalyst for some compelling recent initiatives that just may be reshaping our city. As volunteer chair of the Toronto City Summit Alliance since its inception in 2002, Pecaut, a senior partner in the Toronto office of the Boston Consulting Group, has brought together—and kept together—a wide swath of civic leaders from the arts, business, labour and academia to not just yak about the challenges Toronto faces but come up with adventurous solutions. Pecaut and the Summit Alliance seem to be changing the way things get done in Toronto.

Yet despite his influence, despite the fact that he has placed himself, as John Cartwright, president of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council says, as “the leader of a civic movement that is trying to imagine how to reshape Canada’s largest urban centre,” Pecaut is so low profile that one young “emerging” leader at the meeting had no idea who he was. But a smartly suited woman across the room more than made up for it: “He’s the man,” she said decisively, “who should be mayor.”

She’s wrong about that, and why she’s wrong is worth knowing. The story of David Pecaut is the story of volunteer civic leadership, something we don’t ponder half so much as who’s hot and who’s not politically. It requires us to look beyond politics and ask whether more useful things are getting done these days outside municipal government corridors than inside. And it focuses our attention on a new kind of public and private partnership that is changing the way we plan and fund municipal projects and, perhaps, even the city itself. David Pecaut is a soft-spoken man of 51, a successful international consultant whose clients have included Noranda, Torstar and Whirlpool. He is a mostly fortunate man, fortunate in family (“I’ve got a spectacular wife and four spectacular kids,” he will say, marvelling at his good luck), fortunate in material wealth (a charming Rosedale home) and fortunate in recognizing what he is exceptionally good at—getting people to work, as he puts it in a rare slip into consultant speak, “outside their normal silos.” And he puts those talents to use, not only in his career, but also in the community building that he says gives his life real meaning.

Pecaut’s declared goal, his second job if you will, is to make Toronto the most vibrant, economically viable and socially responsible city in North America. He is an enthusiast. He despairs of the cynicism that he feels is Toronto’s default attitude—“Let’s wait and see if it flops before we sign on”—and does his best every day to turn it around. He has been described as Toronto’s “Energizer Bunny,” a “creative spark plug,” a “big popcorn machine of ideas,” and the man who brought business to the table of social reform.