Many inspiring Islanders have been recognized with Citizen of the Year honours over the years. The prestigious award is given out in advance of Bowfest, and sees the winner treated to a starring role in the festival’s parade – in addition to the feeling of knowing they’ve done substantial work to help out their community.
The title of Citizen of the Year is historically given to a single person, but this year there was no separating the two worthy winners. For their immense efforts over many years to secure our island’s own Health Care Centre, Colleen O’Neil and Tim Rhodes are this year’s Citizens of the Year.
Those who followed the journey of the Health Centre will no doubt recognize these two pivotal contributors to the project, Rhodes as president of the board and O’Neil as vice president. They’ve both worked tirelessly over the past decade to make the new facility a reality.
Like the start of many good stories on Bowen, the pair learned about their new titles via a phone call from Graham Ritchie. He informed them of the news, and asked them to be at the Bowfest Parade start line on Saturday morning.
“It’s certainly an honour, but an honour we share with a lot of people,” says Rhodes, noting that while he and O’Neil were the Health Centre’s longest serving board members, the entire mission was made possible by the many other members who made up the team over the years.
O’Neil says these teammates helped keep everyone inspired during complicated and difficult periods of the project. “We just kept hanging in there… because we got more and more very, very skilled board members joining us and lifting us up.”
Rhodes was first recruited by O’Neil following his completion of a municipal council term. “Colleen came to me and said, ‘Well you know how to write an agenda and run a meeting, so why don’t you become the president of the Health Centre Foundation?’ And I said well if that’s all that’s involved, that sounds easy,” he recalls. Of course, while it turned out to be anything but easy, Tim’s step onto the project was incredibly rewarding.
“I would say my biggest contribution was I kept telling the board that as we needed more and more and more money to make it happen, that we’d get the money. And for some reason they believed me. And we did,” says Rhodes.
O’Neil describes her primary role on the project as “Health Centre cheerleader and fundraiser… I was kind of the spirit and community face of it.” There’s a good chance that if you’ve lived on Bowen in the past 10 years, and certainly if you’ve ever been out to the Golf Course, that Colleen made a point of checking if you’d donated to the Health Centre or not. Her persistence was invaluable in bringing the project over the finish line.
And while people likely saw O’Neil out championing the project to the community, she wants to make sure Rhodes’ work behind the scenes doesn’t go unnoticed. “I wanted Tim to be chair because he used to work in the municipality, he knows how to run meetings, worked for an architectural firm, he’s an interior designer, is a tech whiz on the computer, and he knows how to write. So you have to be president,” she told her colleague and friend.
From a 2013 community meeting organized by O’Neil where the Health Centre was nothing more than a far off idea, to the grand opening of the Miller Road facility this April, O’Neil and Rhodes’ calm and constant presence on the board helped guide the many people who contributed to the Health Centre’s success. It was a desire to help Islanders which kept them persevering through the many challenges to accomplish such a task.
“Working at Caring Circle for 10 years… people would come to me with health problems, stuff that I knew should happen on Bowen. It’s simple to solve. If somebody could just have a GP close to home, they would be safe and they wouldn’t be in tears in my office because they needed a dressing change and didn’t drive and had no family,” says O’Neil.
“Stories like that came up all the time. Every couple of weeks, two stitches and a family had to spend the whole day at emergency with three kids. I just thought this is crazy, we need to have health care here on Bowen,” she adds.
“The need for it, the fact that we had a really good working group, and, luckily, most of the problems came one at a time instead of in multiples,” says Rhodes on some of the factors which kept him going. “And enough experience on the board to look at a problem and be able to say, okay this is how you deal with this, this is the expertise we need, and we would go and find it.”
O’Neil has now moved from Caring Circle to the Health Centre, and says it’s inspiring to see the reaction of people who step inside.
“I saw somebody who was doing a little circle going ‘In my entire life I never imagined Bowen Island could do this.' I hear that every day in the hallway, people saying ‘This is amazing. I’d be in town all day for this,'” says O’Neil.
Rhodes has taken the opportunity to retire from his board duties, though he notes there are still many odds and ends that pop up for him to take care of. There are still plenty of people grateful for his efforts as well. “People walk up to me on the street and say thank you,” says Tim. “It’s made a huge difference for all different levels of health care on Bowen.”
For now, Colleen and Tim’s only job is to show up for the start of the parade, and they say to perhaps coordinate their outfits for the big moment as well. Whatever they choose, the achievements they’ve made for Bowen Island will make them a very popular sight this Bowfest Saturday.
