Lane Changer - Cathy Crowe, her lane is the street
Cathy Crowe comes to Weston’s El Almacen
If you’ve been in Toronto for a while, you’ll know the name Cathy Crowe. She’s the fierce advocate who pushes the City to open warming centres in winter, speaks out when people die due to inadequate shelter, calls politicians to account when police dismantle encampments, and so on. She’s also a long-time housing co-oper and because of that, I consider her a friend. I was thrilled when Cathy agreed to a lane-changer interview and wowza, does her life have some significant shifts!
After high school, Cathy Crowe moved from Eastern Ontario to Toronto General Hospital where she received her nursing diploma in the early ‘70s. She started in cardiology and imagined a career in the hospital system. Before long, though, she was a single mother seeking more regular hours. She took a position in a downtown Toronto bank tower nursing at a clinic that did physicals for execs of major corporations. Hard to imagine, knowing her today. She left in part because the clinic extra-billed, and wanted her to do the same. (This practice, now banned, was where doctors billed for procedures outside the publicly funded system.)
Just 30 at the time, Cathy escaped to a position at South Riverdale Community Health Clinic. This lane change was like moving from superhighway to a dirt path, but it’s the path where Cathy was more at home. Around that time, she upgraded her nursing qualifications to a degree from Ryerson (as it was then known).
The control exerted by the mostly-male doctors at the hospital, the bank-tower clinic, South Riverdale, and even in her next role as a nurse-practitioner, frustrated Cathy. In her mid-30s, she joined a group of like-minded women at Street Health, a non-profit providing health care for people who were homeless. Cathy admits she wasn’t convinced the nursing itself would be that interesting, but loved being independent from physicians - Street Health had no connection to a hospital or doctors. Before long she moved on to what is now Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre as nursing outreach program leader, a role she stayed in for a decade. By then, she had also completed a Master’s of Education in Sociology while working full-time.
It was then she became identified publicly with the issue of homelessness as co-founder of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, all against her employer’s wishes. I remember her on the news from my early years in Toronto: her passion came through my TV screen just as it does through social media 35 years later.
Crowe increasingly feared her employer would soon pull the plug on her employment but fortunately the Atkinson Foundation offered her the Atkinson Economic Justice Fellowship. Atkinson is a charity promoting social and economic justice in Ontario. For the first time, Crowe was being properly compensated to do the work she was drawn to do and was free to operate without the constraints of an organization. Cathy used her fellowship to advocate in Toronto, Canada, and internationally for better housing, better services for the unhoused, and more compassionate decision-making. She also started writing, the lane she primarily occupies today.
When the fellowship ended after six years, Cathy had nearly 40 years of nursing under her belt, high profile as an advocate for social change, experience teaching, a Masters degree, a book, a monthly column on rabble.ca, positive feedback from colleagues, and the wisdom of six decades on the planet. She should be a strong contender for a wide range of positions but no-one would hire her. Instead, she spent four years cobbling together an existence, teaching a course here and there and being a paid ‘political companion’ to long-time political activist, Dan Heap in his last days.
Unemployment was a lane she didn’t want to be in. The darkness was offset only by the time it gave her with her three small grandsons and the luxury of writing. Her 2007 book, Dying for a Home, had focussed on people who were homeless and other advocates. She had more to say about her own experiences though. Working from her extensive paper archive, she wrote A Knapsack Full of Dreams: Memoirs of a Street Nurse. The writing gave structure to days that otherwise yawned out ahead of her. Crowe is thrilled the Toronto Archives has received her archives since, allowing others to benefit from her remarkable collection.
After several publishers rejected or requested significant rewrites to her manuscript, Cathy self-published Knapsack. Doing so allowed her full rein artistically and in the promotion of her book. If you’d like to read Knapsack, you can find it in Toronto’s Spacing store at 401 Richmond, where the Museum of Toronto is also located. You can also get her book at Friesen Press by clicking here. The current exhibit at the Museum features 52 women who shaped Toronto, one of whom is Cathy Crowe.
You might think writing would be Cathy’s last lane change. You’d be wrong. Through a connection to Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), Cathy Crowe shaped herself a perfect role - part street nurse, part social activist, part educator. She led students through downtown Toronto on Community Health and Social Justice walks inspiring a new generation to fight the status quo. Click here to watch a short Youtube clip of Cathy on one of her walks - she even plugs co-op housing!
Cathy stepped away from her TMU role last year, and at 72, she could hang up her lane-changing shoes. When I asked her if she envisaged anything more, her response was quick - yes! She’s had a long association with documentary film-making through a close friend, and she imagines developing that further, using her writing skills. Part-time of course - her full-time working days are behind her and would take her away cooking, birding, hanging with her grandkids, all carefully documented on social media.
When I asked Cathy Crowe to reflect on how people in her life responded to her many shifts of direction, she assured me that while she wasn’t raised by lane changers, her mother and now her daughter have always been big supporters. As for how she feels about it, she’s proud she found a way to use her skills for the greater good - first nursing, then mobilizing the conventional media, writing books and columns, and educating. Now Crowe uses social media to her advantage, free to plant the seeds of unrest without fear of being fired!
Would she do it all over again? Yes! But she wishes she’d had more insight into political dynamics at workplaces. Financially too it’s never been easy: street nursing doesn’t bring a pension. But she has no regrets.
Torontonians should be grateful she made those choices too. Today, as people of all stripes acknowledge the growing homelessness crisis, we have advocates like her and those who’ve followed her path to rely on.
Thank you, Cathy Crowe, for shining a light on the issue for 35 years.
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