In many cities across North America and around the world, there is a growing need for alternative retirement options for baby boomer women, and Winnipeg is no exception.
One woman who has decided to confront this challenge head on is Beverly Suek.
Suek, who is well-known in Winnipeg’s feminist communities, has opened a retirement cooperative for women in Winnipeg’s Riverview neighbourhood.
Isaac Wurmann from After the Chorus spoke with Beverly Suek in May, just one week before the first woman moved into 235 Oakwood.
Thank you to Beverly Suek, Lynda Trono, Sally Papso, and Matthew Laurence for providing their voices for this piece.
Thanks also to Micah Visser for the music. You can listen to Micah’s album, ok night, on Bandcamp.
Hi Isaac.
Great article. Many women from my grandmother’s age to now as young adults have little to no retirement packages and little if any income which can be welfare or some of spouse’s money, which makes life rather boring and even punishing. That’s the way it is with women hardly getting a free and full chance to join and stay on at good paying trades careers. More then housing we need some sort of social compensation income and even justice compensation rewards for what we have not been amiably permitted to do. My grandmother passed on a few years back never really knowing the inside of the exiting career I had nor the struggles I suffered in trying to get and keep that career over 20 years. And yet it is people my grandmother’s age that would have been some of my career trainers, mentors and supervisors had we been a truely equality type of nation. I see not much more then my grandmother saw in her last years, a broken home and a few government welfare dollars to spare for a door frame repair if I really try. Eventually it may be few CPP dollars just the same. Let’s keep this conversation going for the benefit of half our aging population so we are equally housed, fed and even entertained.
Thank you and thanks goes out to Beverly Suek, Lynda Trono, Sally Papso, and Matthew Laurence for their part in this.
Julien