Five Quebecers are being honoured by QCGN
Not-for-profit celebrates five Quebecers who are making a difference in the world
She is only 23, but Montrealer Claudia Di Iorio has known more pain than many.
In 2010, she was involved in a near-fatal collision as the frontseat passenger in a car that slammed into a tree when the driver — who was speeding, running stop signs and red lights and racing — lost control of the vehicle.
She sustained a severe brain injury, serious spinal cord injuries and a broken pelvis, was in a coma for a month and was told she would never again walk properly.
Marshalling remarkable strength and resilience, Di Iorio has put her life back together and today she is a second-year law student at McGill University who has run two half-marathons since her rehabilitation and recovery.
She gives presentations in high schools on the consequences of reckless driving, drinking and other dangerous behaviours — and the need for preventing them; she is a spokesperson for Cool Taxi, a system of prepaid coupons for cab fares; she co-chaired recent public consultations on road safety organized by Quebec’s Transport ministry and its automobile insurance board, the Société de l’assurance Automobile du Québec (SAAQ); and in September she attended her first meeting as a member of the SAAQ board.
Di Iorio is one of five Quebecers being honoured this week with awards from the Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN), a not-for-profit organization that brings together more than 50 English-language community organizations. On Oct. 26, she will receive the Young Quebecers Leading the Way Award, established three years ago by the QCGN, the CBC and the Fondation Notre Home Foundation.
Another QCGN award, the Sheila and Victor Goldbloom Distinguished Community Service Award, will go to four people: James Carter, who has worked tirelessly with lobby groups and community organizations and behind the scenes in politics to ensure access to health and social services in English for English-speaking Quebecers; to Clifford Lincoln, who made his mark in provincial and federal politics after a career in business and has championed such varied causes as public transit, the environment and the rights of people with intellectual disabilities; and to Earl De La Perralle and Sid Stevens, co-founders of the Sun Youth Organization.
The Goldbloom award, established in the couple’s honour by the QCGN in 2009, celebrates engaged citizens like Victor Goldbloom (1923-2016), a physician and politician, and Sheila Goldbloom, who was a longtime professor in McGill’s social work school and a mentor to many.
The award winners are proof that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things.
“You just have to want to make a difference,” said Stevens. “And if you are determined enough to succeed, you will. You lose in life only what you stop fighting for.”
Sun Youth has helped thousands of disadvantaged Montrealers over the years through its many programs, from sports and recreation to emergency food baskets.
Revenue comes from private and corporate donors mostly and there is support from all three levels of government. But in the lean years early on, money was so scarce that De La Perralle mortgaged his house so staff could be paid and Stevens contributed half his weekly paycheque from his job at a typewriter company. It was years before the two, longtime volunteers, even took a salary from Sun Youth.
Said De La Perralle: “You have to have the gumption to stay with it, knowing that, at times, you’re not sure you’re going to succeed. We realized we were doing something really important for the community and that if we left it, nobody would take our place.”
To make a difference, said Di Iorio, “You need to have motivation in whatever you are doing. In my case, I have a general thought, which is that I want to do good. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to others. Whatever you’re doing, do it fully. My story is about perseverance: I was in a coma for a month. I was supposed to be disabled, not to walk properly.”
For Carter, a McGill-trained social worker and community organizer, the reward of a career spent working to improve access to health and social services in English for the English-speaking community “has always been in the success of the organization that I worked with.”
What motivates him is “community action for social change. For me, it’s the commitment to that idea and it really is an equation: an affirmation of the value of the community to itself, which is all the organizing and building community leadership, and an affirmation of the value of the community to others, which is political action.”
Like Carter, Lincoln likes to work without calling attention to himself.
“I just do things as quietly as I can,” he said. “I was raised to think of other people and not myself — and so I have always believed that, if you make a contribution, you feel better in yourself and are happier and healthier ... It made you feel better that you could do something that could make life better for someone.”
Lincoln retired in 2004 from the House of Commons, but remains “just as busy as I ever was.” He chairs the board of Executives Available, a not-for-profit organization that trains unemployed management professionals in skills intended to help them to find work and has placed 12,000 people.
And he has been working with the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, who live mostly on the Rapid Lake reserve in the Outaouais region, and helping them to negotiate an agreement with the provincial government on land use.
He continues to exercise each morning and he is at work on a master’s degree at the University of Ottawa in global sustainable development and environmental law. At 89, Lincoln is the oldest person in the program by a considerable margin, but fellow students “treat me as anyone else.”
You have to have the gumption to stay with it, knowing that, at times, you’re not sure you’re going to succeed.