Women’s College Hospital volunteer talks about her family’s history in volunteering.
Audio Credit: The Miss Margaret Robins Archives of Women’s College Hospital.
This volunteer has spent over fifty years volunteering at Women’s College Hospital and at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. At the hospital, she helped organize fundraising events, managed the gift cart on patient floors and even made corsages for January Nite. As president of the volunteer association, she worked tirelessly to raise funds for the establishment of Ontario’s first Sexual Assault Care Centre located at Women’s College Hospital. In 2017, she was awarded the Order of Canada in recognition of her lifelong dedication to volunteerism.
Interviewer: And you had mentioned your husband’s family was very much involved in Women’s College Hospital? Does your family have a tradition of volunteerism?
Volunteer: My family? Yes, my mother certainly did a lot of volunteering. I came from Saskatchewan. My mother volunteered at her church. Her Women’s Auxiliary, kind of thing, but not, not with a hospital. That was where she did her volunteering. Certainly not the same kind of background that my, that my mother-in-law had. They both had seven children, but very, very, very different circumstances. My mother-in-law was expected to, she was born in Toronto, she, her family was a prominent, prominent family in Toronto. And she was expected to do something because she, uh, she couldn’t go on to university or get a job because her father would have thought that that meant he couldn’t provide for her. That’s why Women’s College Hospital appealed to my mother-in-law so much, because she wanted to do something like that. And so she threw herself into, into Women’s. She also was at the CNIB actually.