Sunshine House mourns founder

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This article was published 30/08/2022 (1335 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a full house Tuesday at the West End Cultural Centre, where more than 100 people gathered to commemorate the life of Sunshine House founder Margaret Ormond.

Visitors were greeted with burning sage, sour candies and a Sam Cooke record playing on a turntable.

Ormond died Aug. 19, at 72, after battling cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.

She was instrumental in the opening of Sunshine House in 1999, which was birthed out of Kali-Shiva AIDS Society and the Village Clinic. Today, the non-profit serves a variety of community needs through a harm-reduction model.

“Working in the infancy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped and moulded her connections to communities of the marginalized,” Ormond’s oldest son, Luke Doucet, said at the memorial.

Ormond felt called to many places throughout her life. When she wasn’t at her Wolseley home on Walnut Street or conversing with visitors at Sunshine House, she was volunteering with vulnerable populations in India or delivering babies at Berens River First Nation.

Over the course of her life, she raised six children and shaped the lives of many more. In a phone interview prior to the memorial, Doucet described her as always having “one kid on her hip, a frying pan in another hand, and a cigarette in a third and a cup of coffee in the fourth.”

It was with this precision she juggled being a mother, nurse, activist and more.

“If she could give us any tool with which to face the world, it was the courage to embark on the great scavenger hunt that was life,” Doucet said.

“She did send a prepubescent son (Doucet), all of 11 years old, on a six-week solo backpack journey across Canada, armed with a duffle bag full of fuzzy peaches, Twizzlers, warm juice boxes and a worn-out copy of The Catcher in the Rye. So strong was her desire that we go out into the world and find things to look at.”

As a testament to Ormond’s fierce support of the harm-reduction model, safe use supplies and publications on HIV research co-authored by her were displayed on a table near the door.

In one such publication, Ormond’s author bio described her as “an activist, clinician and writer who is not afraid to go anywhere or talk to anybody. She is the coil that binds this book together, though she’s not crazy about this role.”

As Levi Foy, executive director of Sunshine House, said in an interview last week, Ormond was not one to revel in the spotlight. She loathed bureaucracy. When she was honoured with the Manitoba 150 award, Foy said she refused to let Sunshine House host a celebration.

“I want you to put in print that she would hate all of this. She was so humble and she never wanted any fuss made about her,” he said. “She never wanted any accolades or anything because she didn’t feel that was a good use of her time or energy.”

While Foy said she never had a rigid vision for the organization, it was her fluidity, adaptability and compassion that allowed, and will continue to allow, for Sunshine House to thrive.

“She developed a relationship with everyone that came in because she had that humility and she had that come-as-you-are approach.”

cierra.bettens@freepress.mb.ca