preparing for the day that I could and would make a

difference…

I was the first person in my family to go on to post-secondary school. I became a legal assistant, learning as much as I could, and working part-time in the evenings and on weekends. Eventually I left to join the Addiction Research Foundation. There, I worked with young people from the community who struggled with addictions. It was an incredible opportunity, and I was thrilled to be there.

But almost from my first day at ARF, my boss began sexually harassing me. This was during the same year that the Supreme Court ruling that employers were responsible for their employees, following the suit brought by a woman who had been sexually harassed while serving in the military. I decided I had to take a stand. This resulted in the discovery that my boss had been sexually harassing staff and clients of the addiction centre for decades. After a two-year investigation, he was fired. A total of six woman had come forward to tell their stories.

By age 30 I was in the insurance industry and had become a mother. When my daughter, Cheyenne, was seven years old, her father Mark drowned, effectively becoming my first life insurance client to die. Talk about impact – how quickly I went back to being six and remembering my commitment to provide for my child. The life insurance Mark had was put into a trust for Cheyenne; however, Mark’s sister had been left as trustee. Given the magnitude of this responsibility, as well as the sister’s lack of experience in money management, I hired a lawyer to remove her from that post. It took a year, but we were successful, and ours was the first case in Canada to remove a trustee from a life insurance policy. In the meantime, however, Cheyenne’s aunt had spent part of the trust fund, which kicked off arduous hours spent in court to retrieve what she spent—something that continues to this day.

After Mark’s death, I worked harder than ever. I was promoted that year and opened the only new branch for RBC in Langley. Within six months, their 5 year plan for our growth expectations were met and we broke the company’s records for growth. I become RBC’s top manager and recruiter in Canada. I happened to also be the only woman in my role—and, most important, an only parent.