Stephanie Pollock

In 1992, while attending St. Thomas University in Fredericton New Brunswick, Stephanie was asked to join NEADS as New Brunswick Representative. In 1994, she was elected to serve as NEADS president. Stephanie graduated from STU in 1993 with a BA, and in 1994 obtained a Bachelor of Education from the university. Stephanie served as past president during her final two years with NEADS (1996-1998). She is currently working for the provincial Department of Finance as a tax program officer, and enjoys reading, public speaking, watching TV and playing with her three cats.

Remarks

Stephanie Pollock described the experience of being invited, in 1992, to her first disability conference, which led her to join NEADS and eventually to become board president in 1994. For the next two years, she traveled frequently while finishing her degree. “I had the opportunity to meet great people,” she said—adding that although she met government and university officials, “it was the everyday people I met who impressed me the most.”

Now that Pollock is in the work world, she says that she sees more of the discrimination and powerlessness that she was protected from as a child. To amplify that theme, she told the story of her first trip to Toronto for a NEADS meeting. She walked up Yonge Street after dark with a friend and later reassured her parents that she had been perfectly safe. “But I confess now, I left out one detail. [My friend] was completely blind!” She described herself walking down the street with crutches, alongside her friend with a white cane, and remarked, “It was like Moses parting the Red Sea!”

Although her work with NEADS is today a distant memory, said Pollock, she recently used Google to search for herself, and she found an article that she had written as NEADS president for a national magazine. But the lasting legacy of her time with NEADS is not “just the trips I went on and the reports we wrote,” she said. It is the fact that NEADS membership “boosts self-esteem when we need it.” Members of NEADS can not help but think of others and learn to care about others. NEADS members improve themselves, their leadership skills, and their self esteem, and they learn to dig deep for the strength they need so that “when the world kicks you, you come out swinging.”