Photo: Contributed
Two Okanagan College alumni have been honoured for their community impact.
Vernon’s Bree Cawley and Kelowna’s Christina Fast earned the highest honours from the college’s alumni association for their outstanding contributions to community and industry.
Cawley was honoured with the Distinguished Alumni Award.
She graduated from the bachelor of business administration program in 1999 and since then has made her mark in communications, marketing and non-profit leadership for a host of organizations.
In August 2017, after realizing the lack of support there was for her daughter who was born with a brain abnormality, Cawley founded the Okanagan chapter of Girls Club.
The group offers girls with autism and neuro-developmental differences a place to be themselves and connect with others who share in their experience. It is 100% volunteer run and relies on donations to operate.
Initially, Cawley was funding the club’s activities out of her own pocket before receiving grants to continue the program.
“The work that Bree is doing is affecting hundreds of families,” co-founder Vicky Ryan said.
“I am still not sure how I deserve to stand up here and accept this award, but I am incredibly grateful for the chance to do so,” Cawley said.
Fast is the recipient of this year’s Young Alumni Award.
Since graduating from the renamed medical device reprocessing program in 2006, Fast became an International Association of Healthcare Central Service Material Management certified educator and began teaching internationally trained health care workers, unable to be licensed in Canada, how to sterilize surgical instruments.
In 2011 she volunteered to work as a sterile processor on the Africa Mercy ship in Sierra Leone. Finding no organization that worked to address the obvious need for proper sterilization in local hospitals, Fast founded SPECT—Sterile Processing Education Charitable Trust.
Over the last eight years, SPECT has worked with staff from more than 100 hospitals and 60 clinics in African nations. Fast has educated and mentored over 500 workers as well as advocated with local and national governments to address standards to improve sterile processing.
“We just did a study in Tanzania with Harvard University collecting the overall data. There was a 50 per cent reduction in surgical infection rates,” SPECT chair Olive Fast said. “It’s incredible—one woman’s dream to make a difference is saving a huge number of lives.”
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