For nearly a decade, the small town of Chapleau went without a regular family doctor, leaving the community alienated and isolated. In 2005, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine was established to train doctors from the north for the north. Former nurse Doris Mitchell, from nearby Brunswick House First Nation, entered the school in midlife. She and two other graduates now serve as family doctors in the community from which they came, becoming models for innovative rural health care.ETRIT DEMAJ | 27 |

COO, Hepta Systems

It was the morning after his 10th birthday that Etrit Demaj left behind everything he knew.

It was 1999. He and his family were in Kosovo and the bombs and the guns and the soldiers walking through his hometown meant an ethnic war was escalating. That morning, his mom looked him in the eyes and told him she had sewn money into the waist of the jeans he was wearing and if they were to be separated — if something unthinkable were to happen to her or to his dad or his older brother — he should keep the money hidden and use it to travel as far toward the country's border as he could.

His family survived the evacuation; their journey took three