Day in the life: Nancy Pike

When Nancy Pike is in her office in UVic’s School of Social Work, you will probably find her door open. Fitting, since her role at UVic working in collaboration with the Vancouver Island Health Authority (VIHA) is all about opening doors for social work students looking for good practicum placements.

“You can call it opening doors,” says the avid gardener, “but I like the idea of calling it planting seeds. You do what you can to make the environment right, but the rest is up to the plant.”

For the past two years Pike, the school’s field education coordinator, has been spending half her time at UVic providing opportunities for social work students and the other half working at VIHA cross-pollinating between the social work curriculum and the needs of the regional health district.

“The unique position I have here allows me to influence the curriculum in our program while identifying opportunities within the health system for graduate practitioners so they can be prepared to respond to the immediate needs of an industry that is rapidly changing.”

After earning a teaching certificate in 1970 from UVic, Pike taught elementary school in Victoria until 1971. She moved to Vernon, BC, to start a family in 1976. While living there she became involved with the Vernon and District Association for Community Living in 1984, and oversaw 14 programs as its executive director for 12 years between 1988 and 2000.

“In working with people who have intellectual disabilities in Vernon, I realized that our laws and ways of being in Canada provided them with opportunities to be equal citizens,” she says. “The more I learned about human rights from that perspective, the more I became committed to that in other areas like poverty and discrimination, and that just brought me closer and closer to social work.”

The experience drove her to pursue a Bachelor in Social Work at UVic in 2002. This led to a Master’s in Social Work from Dalhousie University, which she completed in 2006. The experience of returning to school after many years away informs the way she works with students today.

“I recall being scared,” she says. “Since many of our students are also working, they often come to the program with a lot of anxiety about being back in school and managing the balance between life, kids and career.”

A mother of three and now a grandmother, Pike says that it was her personal connection to someone with a disability that encouraged her on this career trajectory, but admits not fully understanding the challenges of a developmental disability until she encountered it first hand.

“Nevertheless, I always felt that everyone should have an equal opportunity to an education, so my interest in social work probably started in my early 20s when I was teaching elementary school.”

She describes the special opportunity that you get when you are there, watching someone learn.

“There’s a moment when you ask that question—when your curiosity opens a door for someone else. And you are never really sure where they’re going to go when you open that door, or even if you’ve opened the right door,” she says. “But there are those moments when you do…that’s when the world stops because you’ve hit it. That’s when you start to see the growth and energy that flows out when someone is learning. Done well, that’s pretty much what social work does too.”