Lawyer Shuah Roskies worked for decades in government practice as a tireless child advocate. Working with the Ontario government, she discovered professionals in various social sectors were not talking to one another about how their work affected kids in care and that programs been set up in good faith by one branch of government unintentionally undermined the impact of programs set up by another.Andrew Sepielli/Supplied
When child-protection advocate Shuah Roskies learned that some officials in Ontario were issuing tents to kids aging out of foster care, she knew she had to act.
Ms. Roskies had been speaking for years with Heather O’Keefe, founder and executive director of Ontario youth protection non-profit StepStones for Youth, which advocates for kids aging out of care. This past May, Ms. Roskies took a year’s leave of absence from her job as a lawyer with the Ontario government and signed on with StepStones full time as its director of innovation, education and partnerships. That work abruptly ended on Aug. 27, when she fell off a cliff and died while hiking alone at Mount Nemo Conservation Area near Burlington, Ont. She was 47.
StepStones for Youth is a non-profit that focuses on improving educational outcomes, reducing homelessness, building support networks and driving at system changes for youth involved in child protection in Ontario.
Ms. Roskies had worked for decades as a child advocate in government practice. Her distinguished career included stints advising the Motherrisk Commission and time as a key point person with Ontario’s Office of the Children’s Lawyer, managing and mentoring the network of OCL panel lawyers across the province in all matters related to services provided to youth aged 16 to 18.
Shocked at how the social systems in Ontario meant to support foster children were failing them, Ms. Roskies was determined to do something about it. Her mantra: “No more kids in tents.”
Only 46 per cent of youth in foster care in Ontario graduate from high school (the provincial average is above 80 per cent). Within six months of leaving care, 57 per cent will be jobless, and they are a shocking 192 times more likely than their peers in Ontario to be homeless.
Even so, the size of the population of youth in care in Ontario is relatively small, with approximately 1,000 kids aging out of care annually, on average, according to StepStones. Consequently, Ms. Roskies believed that in Ontario, a wealthy province, this group’s appalling outcomes were both unacceptable – and solvable.
While working as a government lawyer, she discovered that professionals in various social sectors – namely, education, health, homelessness, unemployment and child protection – were not talking to one another about how their work affected Ontario’s kids in care. Worse, programs that had been set up in good faith by one branch of government unintentionally undermined the impact of programs set up by another.
For example, one program intended to support kids aging out of care made a government benefit available to kids tax-free. Recipients of this benefit therefore had no incentive to file a tax record. What they didn’t realize, and what they didn’t have a financially literate adult in their lives to show them, is that they needed to file tax returns anyway because they would later on need a tax record to qualify for some low-income housing. The tax-free benefit structure inadvertently created a situation in which the young recipients were less likely to qualify for low-income housing.
Ms. Roskies knew solutions to these problems could be simple: The young people could be provided with financial literacy training and counselling, for example, instructing them both on how to file a tax return and how subsequently to apply for housing benefits. But she also knew that to solve the problems at the necessary scale, multiple decision makers from multiple sectors needed to be brought together and persuaded to engage. That was the only way, she believed, to generate the solutions that were fit for purpose and to source the budgets and donors from whom those solutions could be funded.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ms. Roskies set up an informal network she called the Youth in Transition Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Exchange. This initiative, first established online, brought together legal practitioners working in government, officials and social workers from across the relevant sectors. The goal was simple: to make common cause, identify key systemic problems and work together to address them. At its first meeting, Ms. Roskies gathered 12 participants. By the time of her death, the network’s membership had grown to 500.
“She was the rock star of child protection in Ontario,” an evidently emotional Ms. O’Keefe said on a video call. “She cared so much for these kids, and she was working on every possible front to bring the right people together to figure out solutions. When she joined the non-profit, people called me up saying, ‘You’ve got Shuah Roskies – this is game-changing. She will make things change in child welfare forever.’ And now, she is gone.”
Shuah Roskies was born on Nov. 4, 1975, in London, England, to David Roskies, a Canadian professor of literature, and Deena (née Bronston) Roskies, an American librarian. (Both now live in Montreal, and her younger sister, Amalia (Mollie) Roskies, lives in Kingston.)
Shuah passed her childhood years in the U.K., Israel, the United States, Fiji, Singapore and Papua New Guinea. She received an International Baccalaureate from the United World College of the Atlantic, in Wales. At AC, as it is known to alumni, her ability to, as one friend put it, “make everyone fall just a little bit in love with her” inspired a new pop music band, the Roskies. She went on to study political science and history at McGill University, history at Oxford and eventually law at York University’s Osgoode Hall.
Ms. Roskies was intellectually brilliant, a top student in all subjects growing up. Her childhood bedroom in Papua New Guinea had quotes pinned up all over the walls. Lines from Julia Child (“Life itself is the proper binge”) shared space with some from Shakespeare (“We are what dreams are made on/and our little life is rounded with a sleep”). And while she could quote e. e. cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay or Andrew Marvell at will, she was equally at home discussing the reality TV series Love is Blind.
She also possessed a slyly subversive, whimsical sense of humour. While in Papua New Guinea, she nicknamed the group of academics and earnest non-profit workers who dominated the expat scene there the “batik shirt crew.” These folks, to the amusement of the locals, would wear out-of-context ethnic dress, eat vegetarian meals and listen to Putamayo music compilations. But while she teased the “batik shirt crew,” she deeply respected the humanistic values they espoused – values expressed in her work for vulnerable children in Ontario, years later.
Ms. Roskies met her future husband, Andrew Sepielli, in Toronto in 2010. They married in 2012 and settled in the city’s Roncesvalles neighbourhood, near High Park. A son, Jonah, was born in 2013; a daughter, Mira, followed two years later.
Her intelligence and her sense of humour both featured prominently in her parenting. She was constantly devouring books on child development and trying out new ideas. None of her fellow moms had heard of Russian math, for example, before she and her husband put Jonah into it.
Yet she never took herself too seriously. At one point, commiserating with equally overwhelmed working parents, she schemed to launch a politically incorrect Uber-like app called Sister-Wives. Instead of identifying nearby cars with available drivers on the map, the app would identify available helpers, signified by circulating grey bonnets.
She cultivated, with her husband, a deep love of music in the whole family. After dinner they would get out the guitar and sing everything from the Staple Singers’ Will The Circle Be Unbroken to Blitzen Trapper’s Furr. They bought Jonah a drum set, mindful (and thankful) that the neighbour next door was hard of hearing. And they made the daily drive to and from the Jewish Community Centre at Spadina Avenue and Bloor Street, so Mira could nurture her love of her Jewish faith at Paul Penna School.
Some of her best ideas for putting people together to effect change – as with her Youth in Transition Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Exchange – came, however unconsciously, from gardening. The pollinator garden she planted on a steep, awkward ledge in front of her house became famous in her neighbourhood for attracting clouds of bees and butterflies, which in turn seeded countless other gardens.
“Shuah pushed us to be our best selves,” Ms. O’Keefe said, concluding an online memorial event that StepStones hosted on Sept. 20. “She could not believe – just could not believe – kids in Ontario lived in tents. She wanted that to change,” Ms. O’Keefe said. “And we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure her work – her legacy – continues.”
To quote Shuah herself: “No more kids in tents.”