STD o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-01-10 published
She saw hope in every street kid
Karen POSITANO a passionate and stubborn advocate
Worked to start training programs, needle exchange
By Catherine
DUNPHY,
Obituary
Writer
Perhaps this anecdote can best sum up the many parts of Karen
POSITANO, a petite and driven dynamo, an original, as well as
a world traveller, insomniac, wife, mother of three and champion
of every street kid who came by Youthlink Inner City, the drop-in
resource centre and outreach program where she worked for almost
16 years:
It was 1994 and
POSITANO was in Amsterdam at a world A.I.D.S.
conference. She had met up with Hélène
LALONDE, her buddy since
their teenaged days in Ottawa when they lived innocently but
recklessly and knew everyone, including bikers and drug dealers.
She and
LALONDE, now a consultant often working for the Canadian
International Development Agency in developing countries, were
standing at a bus stop when a passerby shrieked: "Karen
POSITANO!"
It was Gwendolyn, a stripper
POSITANO knew from Toronto who was
in Amsterdam working at a live sex show.
"Karen POSITANO?" echoed one of the other people at the stop.
Turns out this person was with the World Health Organization
and had been seeking
POSITANO to sign her up as a speaker at
a Rio de Janeiro conference for street kids, and she'd been hard
pressed to locate her, as
POSITANO had spent much of the last
two days marching on the street with prostitutes.
"Yeah, she left me at the hotel," said her youngest daughter,
Jill ROCHON, with a laugh. She was 14 at the time. "I was safe
there, she knew that."
POSITANO was well known internationally. She was invited to make
presentations at another world A.I.D.S. conference in Vancouver
as well as at various H.I.V. and A.I.D.S. prevention and hepatitis
C gatherings throughout North America.
In Toronto she was a member of Councillor Olivia
CHOW's children
and youth committee.
What she was renowned for was her tenacity, her push and her
passion. After her first marriage failed and she lost her bid
to convince a court to change her children's surname to hers,
she took the matter to the Supreme Court.
"When she decided to do something, you just got out of the way,"
said her second husband, Gerry
ROCHON.
"She definitely had a stubborn streak," said her eldest child,
Karyn, 31. It is why she and brother Cain, 30, have the surname
POSITANO.
In the early '80s,
POSITANO and
ROCHON and the three kids moved
to Ottawa from Vancouver where they had been living. There she
worked full-time and went to school full-time, getting a degree
in criminology plus her master of social work. She also organized
and played in a women's baseball league, acted in university
theatre, took dance classes and travelled to exotic destinations
such as Thailand.
She began working with street youth at Youthlink Inner City as
part of the job placement for her social work degree; she was
so enthusiastic about the work that not only did she convince
her family to move to Toronto, she also created her own full-time
employment there.
"Inner City was the root of her work. It catered to youth no
one else would, those with mental health problems, prostitutes,
drug users," said Rebecca
BASSEY, a friend and former employee.
POSITANO never let anything stand in the way of getting more
programs or more program dollars for the youth she saw every
day at her office. Her funding proposals were legendary -- succinct,
persuasive and usually written a month before the deadline --
but her first work for Youthlink was the production of two very
radical education videos for street youth.
STD
Street
Smarts and
Street
Wise Women came with a warning of
"frank language and explicit imagery" because the penises in
the videos were real.
"Some people might say her style was abrasive," said Liz
GREAVES,
Youthlink executive director, "but she shot straight from the
hip."
In 1999, she blasted the Mayor's Task Force on Homelessness,
of which GREAVES was a member, for ignoring the plight of homeless
youth.
"She was absolutely right,"
GREAVES said. The task force subsequently
commissioned a report.
Fearless and always on the cutting edge,
POSITANO was an early
advocate of Youthlink's work in harm reduction. The agency was
the first in the city to run a needle exchange program.
In 1998, she was one of the organizers of a program for squeegee
kids, a new headline-grabbing demographic that was unsettling
if not scaring many people in the city. While police were cracking
down on homeless people in public places and the provincial government
was bringing in the Safe Streets Act,
POSITANO was part of a
group lobbying Toronto politicians for resources to help these
youth. The result is a fully federally funded training program
teaching computer skills called the Youth Skills Zone.
In 1995, POSITANO was promoted to supervisor, responsible for
a staff of about nine at Youthlink Inner City's drop-in/resource
and outreach program. She started the Sock Swap, gathering cast-offs
from families and Friends to recycle to the street kids. Before
the centre got its washer and dryer, she'd take all the dirty
socks home to wash them. She also started a monthly supper club
for street youth with hepatitis C.
An early proponent of the peer educator program, in which clients
work 10 hours a week at the drop-in and do outreach with other
street or addicted youth, she conceived and won funding for the
advanced peer education program.
This is a year-long full-time staff position, "one of the most
important positions we have," according to Inner City supervisor
Diana WALKER. "I think Karen saw hope in everyone who walked
through the door."
POSITANO raced through her life, taking each of her children
on a coming-of-age trip to Europe, meeting up with
LALONDE in
Kenya, Brazil and Egypt, holidaying with
BASSEY in Jamaica and
with her husband in Morocco, and finding thrift stores wherever
she went. She volunteered with Habitat for Humanity building
houses in Fiji, Uganda and India, where she met Mother Teresa.
Once a month, she spent her Saturday mornings working in the
Big Sisters thrift shop at Lawrence Ave. W. and Avenue Rd. More
than once she climbed the C.N. Tower stairs for the United Way.
For kicks, she was an extra in David Cronenberg's The Naked Lunch,
stalked celebrities on the red carpet at all the Toronto Film
Festivals, dragged family and Friends to rock concerts, and plundered
furniture discarded in Forest Hill and Rosedale. She and
ROCHON
bought, renovated and sold nine houses together. She also loved
organizing and decorating them.
"She packed a lot in," said
ROCHON. "It was as if she almost
knew she wouldn't have a long life."
She'd beaten cancer of the uterus 14 years earlier, so she was
typically upbeat when she was diagnosed two years ago with breast
cancer.
"She had the kind of personality that you just thought she would
beat it," said
LALONDE.
"She always said it was no big deal," added
BASSEY.
And they believed her even when she suffered a heart attack a
year ago that almost ended her life.
POSITANO rallied enough
to sometimes make it back to work and to her office with the
window that looked out on to the kitchen and eating area of the
drop-in centre.
"I used to update her, make her feel at home because she didn't
know a lot of the clients now," said John
LAFORME, a crack addict
and regular at Youthlink for four years.
POSITANO always encouraged
him to get the help he needed and last month he left for a detox
facility in Quebec. "I'm doing it for me and for Karen," he said.
"I've been in drop-ins and agencies across Canada and Karen was
one of the best drop-in workers ever. She took the time to get
to know you."
Ten days before she died, at her home on the afternoon of October
1 at the age 52,
POSITANO attended a Youthlink managers' meeting.
A day or so later, she sent Liz
GREAVES an email saying she was
going to lick cancer. "There was such a fierceness to her,"
GREAVES
said.
POSITANO wanted to live long enough to see her first grandchild,
and she did. Karyn named her newborn daughter Kalina, Hawaiian
for Karen.
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