I met my husband 27 years ago, the summer I graduated from high school, and I knew when I met him, he was my life partner and let him know I knew we were going to get married but that I don’t want to get married until we are adults that know what we want to do in life. Eight years later the day after he was offered a job with the Calgary Fire Department we got engaged. I transferred all my financial planning clients I developed over 3 years to another associate, and packed my bags to move from Winnipeg to Calgary.

I gravitated to leadership roles in every job I ever had, and I capped my last year of 7 with WestJet by developing the structures, policies and procedures to create the new department at that time, of WestJet Vacation Groups.

We welcomed our first born after 4 years of fertility challenges and since I had a financial planning background, I had taken full advantage of the WestJet Employee Stock Option Program that would 100% match a max 20% of salary invested in stocks, which allowed me the freedom to choose to stay home and raise our son at that point.

We welcomed our second child and moved to Airdrie with a newborn and 2-year-old to the community of Thorburn. I thoroughly enjoyed raising my kids in Airdrie, I took advantage of the library’s early literary programs, the parent/tot swimming classes at Genesis, and we took daily long walks down the beautiful path system with strollers, bikes and now longboards as kids got older. In 2015 when the kids started riding their bikes I started the Airdrie Block Parent Program which is still active today.

Once kids were in school full-time, I ran for Airdrie council in 2017 and part of my platform was that the city should have a local online business directory and event calendar to connect the community. I made 9th out of 23 candidates and decided 2 weeks after the election I would start a business and Airdrie Exchange was officially open a year later. I invested 3 years of connecting the community through my business and ultimately chose to close during the pandemic as I hoped the City would take it on and provide for free to the local businesses as that made the most sense based on the rampant lack of revenue.

I took on doing distance education at home with kids and by February 2021 we put kids back in person classes based on the impact on their social and mental wellbeing.