She could tell by the child’s eyes that he’d seen pain. So had she. Pain and recovery and sadness and joy and health, Diana Carr has seen it all in the dozens of women and families she’s helped support through the Boundary Women’s Coalition.
But on one day just like many others, when Carr walked through the door of the organization’s old facility–a converted nurses’ residence at the Boundary Hospital, it was too much–for a moment.
“I was walking in like I’d done countless days and bang!'” Carr recalls.
“That’s the thing, you just have no idea when something is going to trigger. But to pretend it’s not there doesn’t work very well, to muscle through it doesn’t work as well as acknowledging it.”
So she did. Carr took a moment, recognized the feeling of empathy for the child, gave the thoughts the space they deserved, the room to reaffirm the support work she and other staff and volunteers were doing, then she collected herself and went back to work.
Carr’s kept going back, 30 years after a group of women got together to support a neighbour fleeing violence, with the same resolve and dedication as when she started. A dozen women, making sure that the phone line for help was being monitored around the clock, to support any stranger or neighbour who called to ask for help.
“I would do just about anything for the Boundary Women’s Coalition,” Carr said.
Most recently, that’s meant coming out of retirement to be the organization’s interim executive director. Carr spent about 10 years as a coordinator with the organization, then another 15 as a board member. Since their last executive director left last year, the coalition asked Carr to come back.
“In spite of the work being hard at times, and even scary, there’s always something more to learn,” she said during an interview at her home.
In her most recent incarnation with the Boundary Women’s Coalition, Carr’s been passing on her knowledge, skills and advice to staff as the organization transitions to take on a new model, one with a leader made up of the collective team. It’s just the most recent of three decades of evolution that the organization’s undergone. Changes started with its members’ philosophies.
Today, the organization abides by tenets of feminist theory, from the way they run their board meetings to their approach with clients too. In 1986 though, it was just about helping a neighbour.
“Probably half of the women there wouldn’t have call themselves feminists,” Carr said of the first women to organize and help support women and children fleeing violence in their own homes.
“But when we engaged in the work, so much the writing was written by feminists that, you know, it just became [part of us, the realization,] ‘Oh gosh, I actually am a feminist.'”
With her own grandchildren, Carr is much more direct, to the point where she’ll stop the show she’s watching with her granddaughter to ask if what the teenage protagonists were doing was appropriate, or spark conversations while driving to soccer practice.
Though she’ll soon be retiring again, having a little more time for Scrabble and cribbage games in the same home where she hosted vulnerable women before the coalition got the nurses’ residence in the early ’90s, the veteran social worker isn’t done working towards changing the ways family supports are offered in the region. Next up for the Boundary Women’s Coalition is a second-stage housing arrangement to extend living supports for vulnerable women and children.
“That’s been something that hasn’t come into the community yet,” she said. Like when they formed a group to support Boundary women and families, Carr said, “We’ve been waiting for it for a really long time. We’ve known that it’s been needed.”
