beyond the ballot
celinasymmonds By SCOTT SCHMIDT The first-term city councillor, who has J
ust keeping up as Celina Symmonds goes through the list of things she’s done since graduating high school in Moose Jaw 20 years ago is a task in itself.
yet to even reach 40, was not unlike many people in that she took some time to realize what she wanted out of life. She was born in 1975 and spent most of her childhood living in Moose Jaw.
Her parents divorced when she was just eight years old, and her father moved out to Medicine Hat. That’s how her first roots
Round the world on our wings.... Round the world on our wings....
were laid in the Gas City but it was years before she’d finally call it home.
“After high school I decided I didn’t want to go to college or university at the time . . . I went to Medicine Hat College for about six months and decided it wasn’t for me.”
Symmonds left the path to become a teacher and went back to Moose Jaw for a few years, where she says she “kind of learned who I was and what my true passion was, which was working with and helping youth.”
She headed back to school, this time in Lanigan, Sask., outside Saskatoon, where she obtained a youth care degree. She has also gone back recently and acquired a designation to work with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
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“I just had an interest in FASD and felt it was an issue that was pressing in the community,” she says. “I felt I had something I could offer.”
In between though is where Symmonds got into working with not-for-profit organizations, the first of which was in 1996 with Big Brothers/Big Sisters in Moose Jaw. She also did some work in her field with a juvenile home in Moose Jaw, helping kids that had become part of the justice system.
Shortly after is when she met her husband Robert, president of Auto Star Compusystems in Medicine Hat, which led quite quickly to her coming back to Medicine Hat. This time for good.
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In 2000 Symmonds began working at the Medicine Hat Youth Action Society and in 2001 moved over to Big Brothers Big Sisters as the organization’s intake worker and community liaison.
Shortly before marrying Robert in 2002, the duo became foster parents. Having such a love for children, and especially those in dire need of help and support, becoming a foster mother seemed like a natural course for her to take.
“I knew I couldn’t have children from a very young age, so we decided to become foster parents,” Symmonds says.
The problem was being a foster parent meant saying good-bye to children, which she and Robert apparently weren’t excited about. The couple received three “beautiful” children through the foster care program and they never left.
“They came to live with us before we were married in 2002. And then in 2003 we adopted our first baby, and our older children were adopted in 2005.”
When the couple adopted their baby in 2003, Symmonds took a year off to stay home with the little one. While motherhood was everything she wanted and hoped it would be, staying home all day was not.
“I enjoyed that year a lot but I also learned that I’m not a stay-at-home mom at heart,” she says. “I need to be out working in the community, so I did a lot of time volunteering in that year, spent a lot of time at the Parent Link Centre.”
In late 2004 it was back to work full-time in the not-for-profit sector, specifically McMan Youth and Community Services (even though nine years later it takes her a minute to pin down exactly where she was and when being that she has bounced around so much). Most recently Symmonds finished up a two-year stint with the Medicine Hat News Santa Claus Fund as the charity’s executive director,
41139360•03/25/14
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