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She has been helping others since childhood.
She grew up in Ontario, the eldest daughter among
10 children, where working together to care for the family and the community was a way of life. She met her husband at a conference in Quebec City. Unable to decide where they should live, the couple flipped a coin one night at a Toronto Maple Leafs game, and O’Neill ended up making the move to Edmonton.
Her first job in Edmonton was as a social worker at the Yellowhead Youth Centre, where “wonderful youth taught me that many people, through no fault of their own, just end up in bad places. That set my life’s work.”
In 1979, she became the executive director of the Big Sisters Society of Edmonton. The organization had just two staff, served 26 children and had a budget of $36,500.
Over the next few decades, O’Neill led the organization as it merged with Big Brothers of Edmonton, and later joined forces with Boys & Girls Clubs of Edmonton — in the largest-ever merger of its kind — to become BGCBigs in 2011.
Today, BGCBigs has 142 staff, serves 5,000 kids and has a budget of nearly $11 million.
“Going to Big Sisters was kind of an extension of
a big family — I never expected that the family would become so big,” says O’Neill, looking back at when she first took the helm. “I’m privileged to have served with amazing people who all want to make Edmonton the best place it can be for kids.”
O’Neill plans to spend her retirement travelling. It’s a welcome respite from worrying “every day” about being a good employer, supporting volunteers, and getting services to more kids who need them.
She offers executive directors this advice: don’t do it alone, and share the burden of your worries.
“It can be a lonely job, and you’ll never solve them alone. At BGCBigs, we could say, ‘We can worry about this together. Let’s never lose the understanding that we are in it together.’ That’s the difference in the DNA.”
O’Neill’s contributions to youth and community have been recognized by BGCBigs through the new Liz O’Neill Award Fund, which was established at Edmonton Community Foundation (ECF), whose board she was on for 12 years. The fund has raised nearly $70,000, thanks in part to matching donations of $15,000 from ECF and the Stollery Foundation, $10,000 from the Flaman Foundation and $5,000 from the Kinsmen Club of Edmonton.
The fund will give BGCBigs youth, staff and volunteers the opportunity to upgrade and develop the very skills and leadership qualities that O’Neill personified throughout her career.
O’Neill is humbled by the fund and hopes it inspires others to contribute to the BCGBigs cause.
“I could think of a lot of people in the community who deserve to have a fund in their name, who have done some pretty spectacular work. I don’t feel that my contribution equals theirs,” she says.
“But I am deeply honoured that people felt this was something they wanted to contribute to. It’ll live forever — and that’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”
30 Together we thrive
“My question to staff was, ‘Do we lay people off or do we all take a five per cent cut?’ We took a vote. One hundred per cent of the staff said, ‘We’ll take the cut.’ And nobody was laid off. In my heart of hearts, I knew that day that we had created something different.”
— Liz O’Neill