The soaring spirit of Chelsea
I’m no artist, but if I were and I had to fashion a shape to express Chelsea MacDonald’s character, I think I’d make something that rose striving upwards, composed of a substance strong and clear like glass that you can see the light through, and I’d make something, oh yes, with wings.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d make her the Spirit of Hope award, but Hamilton glass artist Kelly Lowe beat me to it. And though Kelly didn’t make the award specifically for Chelsea, Chelsea was definitely made for the award. The Spirit of Hope, beautifully sculpted in glass and surmounted by an expressive, stylized glass butterfly.
And so it’s a good thing that Chelsea won it. She received it at the 2018 Mental Health Morning, featuring Margaret Trudeau as keynote speaker. (Recovery Canada, represented at the event by Joyce Oliver, won in the organization category and Cierra Warnick in youth.)
I first met Chelsea, now 26, a year ago when I wrote a column about the thing she did for her beloved grandmother Dorothy, who had always done things for Chelsea, but was living out her last weeks with lung cancer in a nursing home.
Chelsea went on the Bunz Trading Zone on Facebook and asked people to send letters, postcards or handmade cards with their own art or illustration or clip art, conveying whatever words of kindness and encouragement they could pass along.
The results were astounding. Dozens and dozens came in. Dorothy’s spirits lifted with each one and made her final days so much more bearable than they would otherwise have been.
That column was only a tiny part of Chelsea’s story. She works at Good Shepherd’s Martha House.
“Sometimes people come to the front door in mental health crisis
— with no warm clothes, food or diapers for their children.” It’s part of Chelsea’s job to help determine their needs, where they can go.
She’s trained in mental-health first aid and in ASK (Assessing for Suicide in Kids). She volunteers, does advocacy and activism, she sits on several boards. She is, for instance, on the board of directors for the Children’s International Learning Centre and the Hamilton Community Legal Clinic, which has a mental health team which visits various youth centres in the city, introducing activities like basketball, guitar.
She also volunteers with the CUPE human rights conference and she’s helping push forth a resolution about creating psychologically safe workplace environments.
She’ll be speaking about this and other topics when she addresses the CMHA’s National Mental Health For All Conference in Montreal from Oct. 22 to 24. She’s been invited there to speak. She has also been selected to join others, later this month, in lobbying in Ottawa for more affordable child care and to protest against the drift toward more latitude for “for-profit” child care which, says Chelsea, drives up the expense for many parents who can’t afford it, especially women.
“We’re going to make some noise,” she says.
The busy, fulfilling (and, yes, award-winning) life that Chelsea has been flowering into over the last few years strikes an encouraging contrast against the terrible struggles of her earlier years, especially her late teens, when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“When I was 19 and 20, I didn’t want to get out of bed,” she says.
There was a suicide attempt. She was found in the nick of time. She says now that she had so much support getting through, from people like outgoing MP David Christopherson and Denise Christopherson, but especially from her mother Heather whom she thanked at the award presentation.
She says she also benefitted greatly from going into social work at Mohawk College and also from the dialectical behaviour therapy she underwent.
I felt such a flush of joy when Chelsea emailed to tell me she’d won the Spirit of Hope award.
It’s presented annually by St. Joseph’s Healthcare Foundation to recognize an “inspiring individual or organization dedicated to helping people living with mental illness and addiction challenges.”