Theresa McManus
From her days helping out at the YMCA in New West to her decades of work as a Fryette, Shawn Bayes’ efforts have helped improve the lives of thousands of vulnerable folks across Canada.
The Sapperton resident is retiring on May 12 – marking the end of a 38-year career with the New West-based Elizabeth Fry Society. During that time, she’s worked to support women, girls and children who are at risk, involved in or affected by the justice system, and she has spearheaded programs striving to break the cycle of poverty, addiction, mental illness, homelessness and crime.
“Whatever I’ve been able to do is because my coworkers hold me up and let me do it,” she told the Record. “We all know that as a CEO, you can ask people to do things, but you can’t make anything happen. They have to choose to follow. And if nobody follows you, you’re on your own. So I’ve been lucky; they have been willing to give me that trust and confidence. And I think it’s made all the world of difference for the people we serve.”
In recognition of Bayes’ retirement and decades of work supporting vulnerable women and children in New West and across Canada, the City of New Westminster has declared May 12 as Shawn Bayes Day.
“Shawn Bayes’ service to this community and beyond has helped countless women and children build brighter futures,” said the city’s proclamation.
According to the proclamation, Bayes led the New Westminster-based Elizabeth Fry Society of Greater Vancouver to create numerous innovative programs and services for deeply poor or criminalized women that now serve as models in other jurisdictions.
“Shawn Bayes’ unwavering commitment to breaking down the barriers marginalized women face in accessing social supports led to provincial and federal policy changes that improved lives,” said the proclamation. “Shawn Bayes identified children of incarcerated parents as an unsupported marginalized group in Canada and created the nations’ first specialized programming to support them, with her work recognized by the international group charged with furthering the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
Bayes’ efforts to help others began as a child when the then-Coquitlam resident would hop on the Pacific Coach Lines bus and head to the YMCA in New Westminster.
“I had been a youth counsellor there from the time I was like 11 or 12. I used to go to the Y camp every summer and then I went as a counsellor in training,” she recalled. “So I had always worked with youth. … And so I knew I always wanted to work with people.”
Bayes began her career in social services working at youth group homes in northern B.C.
“Living in the far north in the early 80s with youth meant that you saw a lot of issues related to poverty, related to sort of really the cultural genocide that had happened in Indigenous families there,” she recalled. “And so when I came back, because I am from the Lower Mainland, I just really wanted to continue to do that work.”
Bayes started working for EFry in 1985 as a youth counsellor, supporting families to enable children, often teens, to live at home full time. Her next role was working in community justice programs and women’s prisons programs.
Bayes served as the organization’s manager of community services programs and manager of community corrections before becoming CEO in 1997. While Bayes has had many achievements during her time as CEO, here are some highlights:
* Developing a community work service program as an alternative to incarceration for women that became a model for similar programs across the country.
* Successfully lobbying the B.C. government to make it possible for single mothers to take part in bed-based substance use treatment without having to give their children over to foster care, so mothers did not have to choose between getting healthy and keeping their families intact.
* Creating JustKids, Canada’s first supports for children who experience parental incarceration.
* Partnering with New Westminster-Burnaby MP Peter Julian in 2018 to take a petition to the House of Commons for procedural and policy changes that would improve poor children’s access to the supports created to help them. Several of those changes have been implemented (like automatic tax filing).
* Opening housing facilities and shelters for women and children.
* Serving on the National Advisory Council on Poverty.
“I think the things I’m most happy to have been involved in are things that reduce the impact of poverty on children, things that enable women low-income women to care for their children, and then to build a real continuum of care,” Bayes said. “Women … are 50 per cent of the population. We have the same constitutional rights as everybody else. But because we’re so few of the visible homeless, so few of the people in drug treatment or those incarcerated – you build regulation and legislation to serve the majority, and the majority in those groups are men.”
Bayes is grateful for having had the opportunity to contribute to initiatives that help improve the lives of women and children. Because the majority of people in prisons and treatment centres are men, she said policies are often created with the majority in mind.
“Women can often get left behind, and their children particularly,” she said. “So I think women’s organizations are to really be valued and cherished for what they bring. … They’re really needed. And they are needed to be able to support the most invisible part of our community, and the most vulnerable.”
Upon her retirement from EFry, Bayes will work on a women’s and children’s housing/homelessness plan for an Ontario municipality. She’ll also enjoy the chance of spending more time with her partner, whom she lives with in Sapperton, and her mother.
“Serving as the CEO of EFry is a big job. It takes a lot of time. And we often call it being a Fryette; it’s a way of life,” she said. “EFry is a 24-7 organization. Our staff are working around the clock, so the emails are pinging in, and sometimes you have to do what you have to do. So, I will enjoy, I think, a slower pace.”
