Perth Campus Alumni Crucial in Shaping Community (Part I)

When Amy Ayers graduated from Perth Campus’ Personal Support Work program in 2018, she had no idea she would soon find herself on the front lines of a raging pandemic. As a Personal Support Worker in an Almonte long-term care home that was one of the first in Ontario to suffer a widespread, deadly outbreak of COVID-19, Ayers played a critical role in the battle against the virus.

Since those first chaotic months, she has dedicated herself to raising awareness about the pandemic’s impact on the mental health of PSWs and health care workers in long-term care. Ayers says there can be a culture of silence and stoicism in the field that keeps many PSWs from seeking help. She has encouraged co-workers—and, by sharing her story publicly, all PSWs—to seek counselling, stressing the risk of PTSD.

When the outbreak occurred last March, Ayers watched many residents die from COVID, then had to undertake a role usually reserved for a coroner.

“Funeral homes weren’t allowed to come in at that point,” she explains. After standing guard by a body of a deceased resident for hours, once someone from the funeral home actually arrived, Ayers would have to bring the gurney inside and wheel it into the deceased patient’s room. “And we would physically place the body into the bag and onto the gurney.”

Like many other PSWs, the pace of Ayers’ job means she hasn’t had time to absorb what she went through.

“It’s definitely hard to deal with because of the fast-paced environment,” she says. “It’s still hard for everyone to process.”

Ayers is just one example of how the students who pass through the walls of Algonquin’s Perth Campus end up playing critical roles in supporting and shaping the surrounding community. Many students who graduate from the campus are from the region and stay to live and work in the area.

Having an easily accessible rural campus within driving distance for many of the students is essential to their success and ability to study in the first place.

For Perth Resident Wendy Quarrington, who is the Coordinator of the Good Food Bank, a charity operating under the Table Community Food Centre that provides free food-based services to the community, finding out the program she was interested in was available on the Perth campus was a life-saver.

As a busy mother who was returning to school for the first time in decades, the small class sizes, proximity, and sense of community that the Perth Campus provided were essential during her time in the Social Service Worker program (which is currently no longer available on the Perth campus).

“I was looking at going to Woodroffe and then found out the program was here and they were just so amazing and supportive and it really opened my eyes at that time to the power of community.”

Quarrington has brought that sense of community into the work she does today. Her work at the Good Food Bank is a shining example of how she is able to use the skills she learned at Algonquin to positively impact the lives of the area’s residents. The organization provides food donations, meals, and food literacy skills free to the community. During the pandemic, they’ve been providing fresh, high-quality take-away or delivery meals to community members for free, packing over 200 meals three times a week. Through her fundraising efforts, they also support 11 food banks in the community. Pre-COVID, they also accepted and organized donations, and community members in need could come in and actually grab a grocery cart and ‘shop’ for goods, helping them establish a more normal relationship with food again, and giving them a short break from the isolation poverty can bring.

They also run various in-school programs, including one where children learned to prepare different breakfast items, and one where they talk about the roots of—and stereotypes surrounding—poverty.

While Quarrington often finds herself fighting stereotypes about poverty in her work, Haley Bowes, who graduated from Perth’s Social Service Work program in 2012, has made it her mission to fight stereotypes about counselling and psychotherapy in the area.

Born in Carlton Place, Bowes, now a resident of Lanark, decided to return to school to get her social service worker diploma when she was 29. She had come to Perth, where she has a lot of family, to raise her kids, and she found the Perth Campus very accommodating for someone juggling the demands of a young family and a new career path.

“It’s a more personal program because it’s a smaller campus,” says Bowes, “you get to know one another.”

After school, she went on to work in social services, then got her Bachelor’s in Social Work from Carlton University (a transition she said Algonquin teachers helped her with), and became a registered social worker.

It was at this point that Bowes open a wellness centre called Aruma on a 13-acre riverfront property in Lanark. With Aruma, Bowes wanted to change peoples’ ideas about therapy.

“I really wanted to make a place where it wasn’t so stuffy,” says Bowes. “It was more accessible for people. I wanted counselling and psychotherapy to have less of a stigma. We had chiro services there, yoga, workshops, counselling, psychotherapy, and rented the facility out often—there was a farmer’s market. It was all about connection. We had massage therapy, Reiki, all different sides of alternative therapy,” she explains.

“I think stigma surrounding therapy is everywhere,” says Bowes, “but I think it’s harder in a smaller town because people may see you going in.”

By having so many different services in one place, people seen going into Aruma would not have to worry about others knowing what they were there for. In addition, by having so many other wellness-focused services, the centre aimed to shift the idea of therapy being about having something wrong with you to therapy being about helping improve your life.

Her plan seems to have worked: her psychotherapy services have been consistently popular, particularly during COVID. Sadly, due to the pandemic, Bowes made the decision to close Aruma in the form of a wellness centre, unable to run such a large business when they’d had to cut so many of their services. She has now opened a new practice focused on mental and emotional health in Perth under the same name, which you can check out here.

“I see shifts,” she says of the community’s view of her services. “People seem more comfortable.”

The second part of our two-part series on the impact of Perth graduates on the community will be published tomorrow.