The Greenwoods Eldercare Society is governed by a volunteer Board of Directors that bears ultimate responsibility for the direction, integrity, and long-term sustainability of the organization. The Board’s decisions have a direct and lasting influence on the lives of the elders Greenwoods serves and on the health of the Society itself — its finances, its standards of care, and its place in the Salt Spring Island community.
The Board draws on a diverse range of professional backgrounds, including healthcare, education, business, law, marketing, and communications. This breadth allows the Board to bring informed judgment to the full range of matters that come before it, from clinical quality and regulatory compliance to financial stewardship, strategic planning, and public communication.
As an independent not-for-profit Society affiliated with Island Health and BC Housing, Greenwoods operates within a complex environment of public funding, provincial regulation, and community accountability. The Board meets monthly and, beyond setting strategic direction and overseeing the organization’s performance, its members contribute in several concrete ways:
- Advocacy — speaking on behalf of residents and of quality long-term care in dealings with Island Health, BC Housing, and government, particularly on questions of adequate and sustainable funding.
- Committee and working group service — carrying much of the Board’s substantive work forward in groups addressing matters such as finance, governance, and quality of care.
- Fund development — supporting the financial resilience of the Society through fundraising and donor engagement that extend its capacity beyond public funding alone.
- Stakeholder liaison — maintaining productive relationships with funders, partners, residents, clients, families, staff, and the wider community
Each year the Board hosts an Annual General Meeting, announced through the website, member notices, and the local press. The meeting offers both a review of the year past and a look at the year ahead, and all members of the community are warmly invited to attend.
This is an active and engaged Board. Those who serve on it give their time and expertise to an organization that sits at the heart of eldercare on Salt Spring Island, and they do so in the knowledge that their work matters — to the Society, and to the people who depend on it.
Members of the Board of Directors
Eleanor Dawson, Board Chair
After a career in law, Eleanor retired to Salt Spring Island. While a lawyer in private practice, she served as a director and officer of a number of animal welfare organizations, including the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies and the Canadian Council on Animal Care. Her concern for compassionate and ethical care led to Eleanor’s interest in residential care and the Board of the Greenwoods Society. She also currently serves as the chair of a charitable foundation that supports humane education programs that teach the values of compassion, empathy, generosity and responsibility.
Pam Ramsay, Board Vice Chair
Pam has spent over 35 years in health care. She started practicing as a speech-language pathologist but has been in senior leadership roles for the majority of her career. These leadership roles were both at the regional and provincial level and spanned across all parts of the health care continuum. Pam grounds her leadership in creating sustainability, embracing collaboration and harnessing potential within organizations, systems and communities.
Pam was the inaugural Provincial Director of Stroke Services B.C. at the Provincial Health Services Authority and lead numerous evidence-based clinical improvement initiatives in stroke care. Most recently, she was the Executive Director, Lower Mainland Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. This included leading the provincial testing strategy for COVID-19 and the pandemic response for labs.
Pam has always embraced the importance of volunteerism. She continues as an active board member of a national cardiac research organization, with past experience on the board of a community college and activities in support of other not-for-profit organizations.
In her retirement, she welcomes the opportunity to volunteer as part of the Greenwoods Eldercare board as it continues to evolve a much-needed resource serving our Salt Spring Island community.
Lenore Pickering, Treasurer
Now retired, Lenore loved being a nurse, focusing her career on improving care and services for seniors. Her background includes both healthcare education and leadership. After roles as a Clinical Nurse Educator and a Clinical Instructor, Lenore moved into leadership positions in several seniors care settings. These included both owned and operated and non profit organizations. Most recently she was CEO of a non profit in Port Coquitlam, providing both a campus of care residential care, assisted living and an adult day program) and subsidized seniors housing.
Lenore believes that leaders can inspire the best care by empowering caregivers on the front lines – giving them the responsibility and resources to make a difference.
Joining the Greenwoods Eldercare Society Board of Directors will give Lenore further opportunity to serve seniors in a different capacity.
Dorrie Ferster, Director
Dorrie brings a wealth of experience to our Board. She is retired Registered Nurse, experienced Nursing Leader and educator with years of general nursing practice in acute care and mental health. Dorrie led the operationalization and care delivery design of a specialized Alzheimer’s and related dementia care site called Czorny Alzheimer’s Centre. She is passionate about residential care and the opportunities to enhance and foster person-directed care and the building of teams and environments which complement the creation of “the best places to live, the best places to work and the best places to visit.”
Silk Questo, Director
A Salt Spring resident since 1980, Silk brings 40 years of communications experience to the Greenwoods Board. As the founder and president of Victoria-based Malahat Group Communications, she led the development of marketing strategies; public information, advertising and fundraising campaigns; branding and visual identities; and a wide range of award-winning projects for clients in the private, public and not-for profit sectors. As strategic communications planner and creative director, she gained particular insights advising clients in the fields of health care, education, environment, tourism, the arts and financial services. The Malahat Group was recognized with a community service award for its work as the pro-bono communication agency supporting United Way of Greater Victoria during several years of successful fundraising campaigns. Now retired, Silk lives on a small south-end farm raising sheep and apples, writing, singing in a band and sailing.
Stanley Shapiro, Director
Prior to retiring to Salt Spring in 1999, Stanley served as the Dean of Business Administration at Simon Fraser University.
Since then, Stanley has been involved in a number of public service activities on Salt Spring, including: board member Salt Spring Island Public Library; member, Salt Spring Island Parks and Recreation Committee, member of Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee’s Advisory Planning Commission; and board member, Guld Island Seniors’ Residents Association (Meadowbrook) and its planning committee for the new Meadowlane residence.
Dean Olafson, Director
Dean benefited from a long and successful career in the oil and gas industry working on the service side, mainly working for Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Fabrication companies with both domestic and international experience. Although an engineer by trade, Dean’s career was spent mostly as a project manager and progressed into senior management and executive roles in the industry. Through volunteer work at the University of Calgary (U of C) at both the faculties of Engineering and Business, Dean was inspired by the many young students he mentored, and he maintains many of those connections to this day. Dean also sat on various volunteer and fund-raising boards at the U of C. After moving to Salt Spring five years ago, Dean worked for the Capital Regional District as Engineering Manager for Salt Spring Island until his retirement in May of 2025. This work enabled Dean to become integrated into the fabric of the community and he highly values the many connections and friends that he made through this work. Dean’s current volunteer works extend to the local Food Bank, the 100 Men charity as well as being a long term, regular blood donor. Dean looks forward to continuing to serve the Greenwoods family through his service to the Board at Greenwoods.
Holly van Schoor, Director
Holly moved to Salt Spring Island in 2013 to retire and support her mother through her later years as she lived with dementia. Serving as both advocate and part-time caregiver, Holly gained firsthand experience navigating the long-term care system and available programs on SSI, including the time her mother spent in the ECU at Lady Minto Hospital during and after the COVID-19 shutdown.
She brings practical insight to the Greenwoods board from the perspective of caring for a senior resident within the system, along with prior experience serving on private-sector boards in Toronto. Although her post-graduate studies were in the arts, Holly has spent much of her career in healthcare settings, working as a medical secretary and later as the office manager in a family practice.
An advocate for underserved populations, Holly has volunteered extensively with outreach organizations. She continues to contribute in the Salt Spring Island community and Greenwoods board.
Catherine Mateer, Director
Prior to her retirement, Dr. Catherine Mateer (Katy) had a long career in rehabilitation and in postsecondary education. She trained as a speech pathologist and then completed her PhD with a specialization in Clinical Neuropsychology. For 20 years, she provided assessment and rehabilitation services for individuals who experienced physical, cognitive and emotional difficulties following stroke, acquired brain injury and other neurological disorders. Katy pioneered research on the understanding and management of cognitive, behavioural and emotional difficulties following traumatic brain injury and authored three textbooks and over 120 publications on the topic. She developed outpatient and community-based models of rehabilitation to assist individuals in returning to higher levels of independence in their family, home, work and community, promoting a person-centred, holistic and integrated approach to assisting individuals and families in meeting their goals.
Katy was recruited to the University of Victoria in 1994, serving there for 25 years as the Director of the Graduate Program in Clinical Psychology and later as the Associate Vice-President Academic Planning. In those roles she was responsible for program development, academic quality assurance, and meeting accreditation standards. She was also involved in enhancing teaching and learning, experiential, work-integrated learning, indigenous engagement and education, and community/university connections.
Since her retirement, Katy enjoys travel, sailing, boating, gardening, pickleball, and engaging with friends and family. As a member of the Greenwoods Eldercare Society Board of Directors, she hopes to bring her experience in rehabilitation, healthcare, program development and education to benefit the residents, their families and the staff, and to foster seniors care and support on Salt Spring and the Gulf Islands.
