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A Profile of Renate Shearer

Community Matters:  A lifetime of Community Service has taken Renate Shearer from the kitchen to the political front lines. 

This article first appeared in HomeMaker’s Magazine in the late 1980’s.  It is reproduced here, in its original format, with the permission of the author, Eleanor Wachtel. 

Shearer’s beginnings foreshadowed the work that was to become most meaningful in her life.  She was born in a small German town.  When she was two, her father was taken away to a concentration camp, but the following year the family escaped, arriving in New York in December 1939.  Renate and her maternal grandmother were put up in a rat-infested apartment, while her parents were taken to a Quaker farm in Iowa, where they worked in exchange for room and board.  The Quakers, who played a major role in the resettlement of refugees, later found her father a job in Ohio, and the family was reunited in 1941.

This formative experience as a refugee gave her a lasting empathy for the dispossessed.  As a child she was desperately anxious to fit in, to be 100 percent American.  She refused to speak German and she joined the Camp Fire Girls.  By high school, she was doing volunteer work as a leader of Blue Birds (the youngest Camp Fire Girls) and helping children in poorer schools with reading and games.  Partly it came from wanting to be needed and partly from an early sense of justice that developed in discussions with her father on their weekly Sunday walks.  They talked about Ghandi and Eleanor Roosevelt, the integration of the armed forces and pacifism.  “I never felt like a typical teenager, I don’t think you can be a totally carefree ‘cashmere sweater’ person when you start out life like that.”

Shearer won a scholarship to Ohio State University in Columbus, where she studied social work.  It was the height of the McCarthy witch-hunts.  Her mother’s last words as she left for college were “Don’t join anything! I don’t care what you do, but don’t join anything.”  It wasn’t a warning not to get involved, but rather not to end up on any lists.  And it stuck; she isn’t a joiner.  She balks at any party line, preferring the intuitive, the personal and the independent.

While at college, she met her husband, a graduate student in economics, and she was married at 20.  When the family settled in Vancouver, Shearer developed a network of neighbourhood friends, who provided a homemade version of an extended family.  Then, with her two children in school, she began to do volunteer work – stuffing envelopes at the local UN office (because she associated the UN with international peace and refugee issues), then delivering for Meals on Wheels.  Her route was the skid-row run in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.  “I was too dumb to know that was because no one else would go there.”  The experience “started the adrenaline flowing again.”  Seeing the condition of the housing in which the people lived sparked her community involvement.  “There it all was: the loneliness and isolation, the exploiting landlords – every issue in one place.”

That and the serious illnesses in her family (her parents and brother died within an eight-month period) prompted her to seek absorbing part-time work.   She had been out of the labour force for almost 10 years, so was fortunate to find a job that took advantage of both her training and her life.  It was with the YWCA in a program that worked through the schools with two target groups:  immigrant children having difficulty adjusting to Canada, and children who were seen as “kids in trouble.”  “My first day I was handed two six-year-olds who were fried on glue sniffing and told, ‘Do something!’  I took them outside and played hop-scotch.”  She laughs.  “Then we sat under a tree and talked; eventually I got a small group going.”

By 1972, Shearer was working full-time at the Y as the new head of the Outreach Program, operating out of branches in six areas of the city.  Her ability to write effective grant applications expanded that department from half a dozen to more than 20 staff and several hundred volunteers.  “It was a magical time, when everyone thought we could change the world.”  If the world no longer seems quite so malleable, a number of projects she nurtured then have grown into city institutions.  She helped start a multilingual information service – a storefront with two full-time staff who provided information, counseling and referral in Chinese and Italian.  “The city was changing dramatically in terms of immigration patterns, and almost no one had recognized it except the Y.”  That project, renamed Mosaic, now offers services in 15 languages spoken by its professional staff, another 70 languages through volunteers, and 24 hour-a-day interpretation for the emergency phone lines to police, fire and ambulance services. 

Shearer also started programs to combine English language training with work skills for immigrant women so they could have some measure of economic independence.  Her innovative work attracted the notice of the city’s social planning department – the first such department in Canada - and she was offered a tailor-made job there with a triple mandate: to take care of services for immigrants and women, and to be the primary social planner for the Downtown Eastside.  Initially Shearer was overwhelmed:  Everywhere she saw people in trouble and each one made her feel terrible.  “But then I began to see that as long as you dwelt on the individual and not on the overall need for food, housing and health care, you weren’t going to make a lot of changes.  So I began to look at issues and not just people.”  The result was 24-hour emergency services, housing for older women, and the establishment of The 44 (now The Alex Centre), a restaurant and recreation centre where people on income assistance could obtain cheap, nourishing meals, take a shower, do their laundry.  “It gives people some dignity,” she says. 

In 1981, when there was a change of direction at city hall, Shearer left to join two other planners to form a loosely knit consulting firm.  Her first major project was with George Watts, to review the health services of the Nuu Chah Nulth people with the aim of giving them full control.  They are the first tribal council in Canada to win such authority.  Watts confirms what many of Shearer’s colleagues observe.  “She didn’t know that much about Indians but took the time to listen.  She didn’t overpower us.  Her real power is using her brain to help people.  She brought a lot of new thinking to our area.”

The other major event of 1981 was Shearer’s appointment as a provincial human rights commissioner, only a voluntary appointment but for her the culmination of all her community work.  They were a small commission – only four at that time - so they encouraged advisory committees across the province.  In a series of reports, they endorsed the previous commission’s recommendations to extend the Human Rights Code.  They also supported domestic and farm workers, who suffer what is effectively racial discrimination.

In July 1983, when the government introduced the 26 bills in its restraint program, the Human Rights Commission was abolished.  Sheared quickly found herself involved in organizing public meetings to assess the impact of the government’s moves.  The range of cuts was extensive – including the elimination of postpartum counseling, child-abuse teams, the Consumer Protection Branch, and funding to the Vancouver Status of Women.  Public-sector jobs could be terminated without cause, and 25 percent of the civil service was to be laid off.

As popular opposition mounted, Shearer was asked to become one of the trio leading the emerging social movement, the Solidarity Coalition. Catholic theologian Father Jim Roberts, Art Kube (then president of the B.C. Federation of Labour) and Shearer concurred on policy, but she was effectively the head of the Coalition, the guiding force and chair of the meetings.  “Renate’s biggest achievement,” says University of British Columbia professor Bill Black, “was to take totally disparate groups on the political spectrum, from relatively conservative to far left, from seniors to gays to small-business people, and get us in a group where not only could we stand one another, but we could really work together.  I would have said it was impossible to do.”

In the subsequent months, Shearer was front and center at some of the largest political demonstrations Victoria and Vancouver had ever seen.  There were petitions, sit-ins, even a buildup toward a general strike, with government employees, then teachers, on the picket lines.  It happened so quickly there was hardly time for her to consider the implications of moving from behind-the-scenes co-ordination to center stage.  But as she recalls, everyone was doing things they’d never done before.