Cate Collins, a fellow CAPS member, affiliated with the Toronto Chapter saw a women in pain, and asked the community to help her create an experience to help these women continue to serve their local shelters. Read a bit of her story and consider how your expertise can positively impact your community.

Cate had the distinct pleasure in organizing a 5-day transformative leadership retreat for local shelter workers in Arizona. My gratitude flows over to the local businesses and individuals that helped me raise $13,000 in less than 2 ½ months.

As you can expect the secondary trauma and post traumatic stress disorder experienced by seasoned shelter workers is astounding. Having an extensive counseling background I know all too well the affects of this work.

A very high-end salon treated these ladies to a color and cut prior to our departure to set the tone for the retreat.

These deserving women were treated to a specialized retreat and horse ranch to allow them to dive deep in to things that were blocking them, untreated grief, burn out and much, much, more. This unique opportunity allowed them to work on their issues and break through sabotaging behaviors that prevented them from performing better in their workplace plus to bring these powerful new tools back to their teams, clients, families and their community. Follow up of 6, 9, 12 months are all part of the program to support their change. They have created their own mastermind whereby they will meet every 2 months to support each other.

Some of the comments included:

“You have taken a very angry woman Cate and help her melt away years of pain.” “Cate is the epitome of an inspiration, leadership, sensitivity, compassion and warmth. Thanks to Cate I feel so much freer, lighter positive and loving towards myself.”

Congratulation Cate on continuing to make a difference!