“I am just excited to come to work every day after 50 years.”
It started in November of 1972 with chopping vegetables for a luncheon, 50 years later Barb Ward-Burkitt has not looked back.
The Prince George Native Friendship Centre’s Executive Director is celebrating her Golden Anniversary as a part of the Friendship Centre movement.
“I am feeling a ton of gratitude,” she told My PG Now. “I feel that it is such a privilege and an honour to be walking the road that I have in 50 years within the Friendship Centre movement.”
Her start with the Friendship Centre in Quesnel was unassuming.
Ward-Burkitt’s mother asked her to come help peel potatoes and chop vegetables for their 1972 Remembrance Day luncheon.
After they sent a taxi to pick her up and looked after her toddler for the day, Ward-Burkitt said it was not long before she felt she had “really found [her] place.”
She moved to Prince George in the early 90’s, and was named the Executive Director of the Native Friendship Centre in 2004.
“My children and my grandchildren have grown up inside the Friendship Centre movement,” she said, “alongside myself, I feel like I have grown up as well. That sense of family is critically important.”
Ward-Burkitt said she truly loves her work, through good times and bad, which has made the last 50 years easy.
“See[ing] the rewards of the work that we do each and every day, and see[ing] that we do truly change the lives of people” are two of the biggest reasons she has carried on in the Native Friendship community all this time.
“The other thing that has really kept me involved,” she continued, “my Mom was involved in the Friendship Centre in Quesnel for a few years before I came on board. My Mom and Dad are now deceased, and I feel that it is their legacy as well.”
Many people find a community at the Friendship Centre, she said, and she praised the team she has been working with, saying it is so easy to work with likeminded people.
“All of our staff are absolutely amazing, and they are heroes… I am just excited to come to work every day after 50 years.”
“Every part about what I have explained is about people,” Ward-Burkitt said. “I think I am most proud of that – this place is about people, for our staff and for the community as well.”
Her work has been recognized outside of the Friendship Centre.
In 2010, she was awarded the order of British Columbia, the highest honour the province can award, and has been a chair on numerous boards, including UNBC and the Minister’s Advisory Council on Indigenous Women in BC.
In closing, she thanked her family and everyone she has worked with over the past half-century.
“My children and grandchildren have been a part of the Friendship Centre here in Prince George and volunteering since they were two or three years old.”
Ward-Burkitt laughed, and said “my husband has gotten to the point where he has said ‘Okay Barbara, do not sign me up to do anymore volunteering. I think I have put in my time.'”
For more information on Prince George’s Native Friendship Centre, click here.
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