Interior Metis Child & Family Services

After fulfilling my first career of raising my 3 children while at the same time operating a home based business, I decided to fulfill my life long ambition of becoming a social worker.  Therefore, when my youngest daughter went off to kindergarten, I went off to University to obtain my Bachelors Degree in Social Work.  Once again the academic urge has hit me, as I explore my next ambition of obtaining my Masters Degree. 

My first endeavour into social work was working with victims of crime at the RCMP Victim Services.  After several years of this I decided to complement this experience and work with offenders, which led me to a position at Adult Community Corrections.  From this experience I was afforded the opportunity to take on the development and implementation of a provincial pilot project aimed at housing high risk, mentally disordered offenders in a community setting.  I oversaw a compliment of both staff as well as clients at the Lighthouse project until I made a decision to join the team at Interior Metis Child & Family Services as the staff counsellor.  Since then I have worked on several dynamic projects including; the Roots project, an MCFD initiative to re-unify Metis children with their families and/or community; the “Families Are Forever” project, a project that I developed which aimed to proactively address familial breakdown. 

My most recent endeavour here has been the development of an Alternative Dispute Resolution project entitled “Maamuu”, meaning “Families Together”.  A grant from the Law Foundation of British Columbia has allowed us to develop this innovative new project.  The aim of the “Maamuu” project is to reduce the number of children entering into the family court system by providing a front end client driven process based on traditional customs of family preservation specific to the Metis community.  For more information on this project look under the “Maamuu” project on this site. 

When not working at the office I enjoy an active lifestyle which first and foremost includes my 3 children and 2 grandchildren.  In my spare time I take pleasure in snowboarding during the winter and then mountain biking as well as just relaxing at the beach in the summer.  In between these activities I can be found doing one of either; shopping around in Vancouver for funky boots, or searching local second hand shops for unique furniture pieces as well as china plates to create mosaics on.