IH volunteers help strengthen our communities

Teresa is a volunteer at Royal Inland Hospital (RIH) in Kamloops. Twice a week, she helps patients, visitors and staff get to places where they need to be when they need the most help. "I get lots out of volunteering," says Teresa. "You get to meet a lot of different people whether they're employees or people coming in, patients and visitors.”

When 79-year-old Nelson resident Lee Reid retired in 2010, she decided to explore aging and loneliness head-on by connecting with other seniors in her community.

At every turn, she has found opportunities to engage seniors, learn from them and volunteer alongside them. She’s done everything from facilitate events that bring youth and seniors together, to leading Granny Gardening Tours, to launching a project to grow food with other senior volunteers. She has brought seniors’ stories to life in several books. In 2021, she published Stories of Mount St. Francis: 1950-2005, about staff who worked in the former extended care facility (soon to be Interior Health’s Nelson Health Campus).

Her work to create an inclusive and engaged seniors’ community earned her Nelson’s 2024 Citizen of the Year award.

A former mental health and substance use counsellor with Interior Health, Lee still actively explores and studies dementia, trauma treatment and somatic therapy—an extension of her professional training that today, informs her work with seniors.

We spoke with Lee about growing older, her passions, interests and life lessons.

IH: Why are you passionate about working with seniors?

Lee: Their vulnerability and their loneliness touch me deeply. As I age, I feel my own frailty and am always exploring how to support that in myself and with others. I think that seniors carry a great deal of life experience and gutsiness that younger folk (like me and on down the chain) need to grow from.

Nowadays, I am interested in storytelling as a form of oral education and wisdom transmission. I’m co-facilitating a literacy storytelling and art group with younger and older people. Here, international students, seniors and new Canadians can relate, safely. Like a multicultural community.

My service ethic arrived and grew with aging. I realized that we seniors still can participate and offer skills to the community and to each other, despite our frailties and fears.

IH: Before retiring, you had a career in mental health, addictions and counselling. How has that shaped your life and retirement?

During my time with IH, I trained in trauma work in a specialty area that fascinated me: somatic therapy. This focuses on the biology of our nervous systems and how, from birth, we code trauma and memory in our bodies through a felt-sense intelligence that operates below language.

At IH, I was considered a clinician with a Jungian specialty, as well as a somatic therapist who encouraged body awareness in my clients. I trained master’s level students to use some basic somatics in the relapse prevention groups that I initiated. To this day, the weekly relapse group continues at Nelson Mental Health & Substance Use.

This awareness of the nervous system has influenced every aspect of my post-retirement entrepreneurial endeavours. I have facilitated groups ranging in themes from food security to literacy and dreamwork; from intergenerational groups with seniors and youth at the secondary school, to writing articles, books and reviews for an online journal. Somatics gives me the universal language to connect with youth, Indigenous folk, and people from diverse cultures. They all recognize the language of the nervous system, as it is everyone's common emotional currency.

IH: You volunteer at Nelson Jubilee Manor. What motivates and inspires you to volunteer in long-term care?

Lee: It began with the loss of a friend who died from dementia, at a time when I was interviewing former employees of Mount St. Francis Hospital (MSF). MSF was an IH extended care facility from the late 1990s to 2005. From those interviews with MSF staff who worked closely with dementia, I realized that for most of them, it was a labour of love.

Although I grieved the disappearance of my elder friend into dementia, I also saw that she was surrounded with love from the community as well as in extended care, where she died. 

Work in extended care is about connecting with people in a host of unusual ways. I like the challenge and the love that this generates. I might try reading some poetry to them or remarking on their family photos which are usually decorating their room walls. Much of my relating with folks who lack speech is non-verbal, using facial expressions and body language to interpret what people feel or need.

Personally, I find that many patients in extended care have developed an inner spiritual space that is hard to define in language...it is a lovely quality that I experience in them. My guess is that their former modes of self-definition have dissolved. My friend with dementia seemed to die/dissolve into that space, seamlessly and slowly, but her radiance grew exponentially as her “self” faded.

IH: What have you learned through your volunteering and advocacy? What is your greatest lesson?

Lee: To be authentic and vulnerable in almost any situation. There’s an invisibility/ageism with aging, but I try to use this to my advantage. When I was chosen Nelson Citizen of the Year, I was shocked, delighted and scared because I had lost my anonymity.

Aging or looking “old” is a state that can generate trust or vulnerability in people who normally would trust no one. So as an elder, I can cross boundaries into peoples' differing realities because I look kind and harmless, like a granny. As I age, I also appear more androgynous, and this is freeing!

IH: What gets you up every morning?

Lee: Light and nature, the daylight, the garden, the people I care about, the pain of the world, and a larger mission. 

I get up each day with a sense of responsibility to engage with people in kind ways. This is not religious for me. Each day holds that sense of “not knowing” for me, which can be scary.

IH: What’s ahead for you in the next year? The next decade?

Lee: I want to volunteer mostly in hospice and palliative care. I do feel grateful that I have a sufficient pension that provides for my basic needs. This support allows me to share whatever skills I have, when needed. 

I have no interest in a dreary old age where I count the monotonous days until I can die! And I hope to engage my own dying time with full awareness, using somatic skills to reduce any pain or fear. I hope to die surrounded with the kind of love that fuelled the compassionate community at Mount Saint Francis Hospital. For now, my intention is to provide a compassionate presence for seniors who are contending with end-of-life changes.

My standing joke for “when I grow up” (or older through my 80s) is that I want to be a tour guide at the new IH Health Campus in Nelson. I would share stories about the legacy and history of compassionate care that has characterized extended care at its best in the Kootenays.

IH: Do you have words you like to live by, or a favourite quote?

Lee: Margaret Mead said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." 

National Volunteer Week is April 27–May 3, 2025. This year’s theme is Volunteers Make Waves.

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