WAVE began with lived experience — not just strategy. Our founder, Keith Brewster, didn’t enter philanthropy as a corporate pivot. He came to it as someone who grew up on the receiving end of generosity: food banks, social supports, subsidized housing, and summer programs that quietly carried him through childhood in Northern Ontario. That first-hand understanding of what giving can truly mean shaped a lifelong commitment — to help others give not just more, but better.

After his doctoral training, Keith built a career in the food industry, a path that led him to personal success and into the circles of high-net-worth individuals eager to give back through their businesses and private foundations. What he discovered was a gap: philanthropy too often felt cold and institutional, or shallow and transactional. What was missing was the very thing that had carried him through his life — depth, intention, and human connection.

WAVE was built to close that gap. Today the practice runs along three lines, all held as strategic consulting: family office advisory, covering governance, succession and how a family works with its advisors; philanthropic strategy, the design, structure and governance of how a family gives; and legacy and story, the family archive, recorded sittings and private family book that record why any of it was built. Some families begin with one. Private Counsel carries all three.

Keith has now sat on both sides of the ledger — as a recipient of generosity, and as counsel to those with the means to extend it. That is the perspective WAVE was built on, and it is why the work runs deeper than the transaction: what is built matters, but so does the record of why.