Enthusiastic leader helps diverse communities in York, Simcoe
Rebecca Shields praised for enthusiastic approach toward mental health

Yorkregion.com
Feb. 22, 2017
By Kim Zarzour

In her younger years, Rebecca Shields walked her dog in her Vancouver downtown east side neighbourhood.

She lived not far from the local safe-injection site, an area notorious for drugs, prostitution, homelessness and crime, but her white fluffy puppy revealed the neighbourhood’s hidden, human side.

“He was just a puffball of a thing and people who were ‘street involved’ would come up and pet him,” she shrugs. “It’s just humanity, right?”

Humanity is what drove Shields to make her mark in Vancouver and now, it is driving her here in York Region.

Shield was named on the Top 40 Under 40 in Vancouver in 2012, Newsmaker of the Year in 2014, and in 2016 she was presented with the Women Worth Watching award, a North American accolade that honours women who are leaders in their field.

It’s an unexpected trajectory for a private-school educated chemistry degree holder.

Shields’ career was heading in a very different direction - food chemistry - when she had “a moment”. She didn’t want to be a scientist. She wanted to do what she loved doing: volunteering and helping others.

“I come from a family of volunteers,” she says. “It was always in me.”

So she made the switch, taking progressive positions with the Vancouver food bank, Deafblind Services Society of BC, the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) Vancouver-Burnaby branch and now, with the CMHA York Region and South Simcoe branch as chief executive officer.

Or, as Shields prefers to call herself, chief enthusiasm officer.

That enthusiasm is in evidence as she talks about her current focus, building cultural competence in the branch’s mental health services across York Region and South Simcoe.

About five years ago, the York-Simcoe branch looked at its data differently, she says.

“We realized the organization wasn’t serving people in the way we wanted to.”

Turns out six per cent of their clients identified as having a first language other than English, but overall in the community, one third of residents use English as a second language.

Mental illness affects us all and the many new Canadians in the region, facing trauma of relocation, may be at higher risk. At the very least, she says, those numbers should be the same. It appeared people were falling through the cracks.

“We need to be able to reach people who are marginalized, who face issues of stigma, particularly in hard-to-reach communities where their understanding of mental health can be extremely different from the Westernized model.”

Under her leadership, the branch embarked on recruiting and training that would ensure all service providers were “culturally competent”; new programs aim at reaching out to communities facing barriers of language, stigma or access.

“We need to do this not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because there’s real societal cost if we don’t.”

Shields seems undaunted by the task.

“I’m an eternal optimist,” she flashes her characteristic wide smile.

“I’m so thrilled to be able to do my part to create communities that I want to live in. And I get to work with the most passionate people, surrounded every day by people who are doing good work. How lucky am I?"