Tracey Warren: Put the joy of life ahead of your work

by Laura Mushumanski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

(ANNews) – “When you find something that you love – your passion, it is easier to not give up. It’s your walk to your gift, to you,” says founder of Child Safe Canada, Tracey Warren. Work is important, but putting the joy of life ahead of your work is fundamental for living a good life.

Warren began Child Safe Canada in 2002. Safe education still “means everything to me [by] being together and helping each other,” she explains. It is about prevention, support, and how we are guiding children by teaching and walking with kids at younger ages on how to stay safe.

Warren grew up on the streets, and that came with a lot of challenges for her that eventually led to her role within community “serving an important purpose … by being able to give back [to community] in a meaningful way.” The safe education programs that Tracey started doing on her own grew into accessible education from coast to coast that community agencies utilize to teach safety for youth.

Being a Cree/Metis woman and knowing the importance of community and taking care of each other, Warren also created safe education programs for Indigenous communities with Indigenous reflected content. Child Safe Canada provides learning packages with nations to run the programs themselves in their own communities, including educational information on asking for guidance, reaching out for help, and anger management—having in mind that these programs are there to “plant seeds to start and take root” with children.

“It is a lot easier to be brave when you are doing what you love,” she says. “You will be successful if you do it in a good way.”

Involved in community all her life, Warren shares a long link through her ancestors as Metis people have always stayed safe through education and Ways of Knowing, doing what “us Metis do: we survive and thrive.”

The teachings that Warren walks with are embedded in “Indigenous persons, we are one: kind, honouring, genuine, present… It all starts and ends with what we know [by] listening and [that] brought me to where I am today.” A mentor along the way showed Tracey “what was ‘right’… [acknowledging] families and children [and asking them] what is it that you need?” Another teaching that influenced Warren was “being a kind and gentle person about sharing knowledge” and since then Tracey has honoured these teachings by bringing them into how she walks in the world every day.

The mother of two daughters, they have “now become my mentors. [I’m] learning from them [and being able to] walk forward in the same and in different ways because the world is changing fast, and it is important to listen and learn.”

Another way that Warren continues to learn is by “connecting and bringing humility to the land, grandmother moon, trees… Teaching gratitude, understanding challenges, being humble, and taking time to listen to the wind…and going to the land, building a relationship with the land and [learning] how important it is to make connections and be [continuously] connecting.”

“As long as you have water in your tea, you will always have tears,” Warren shared when speaking about finding courage to keep moving forward – the courage that comes with crying. She also shared an understanding that “listening to all our relations, and taking the teachings and putting them into practice is bravery… It is a lot easier to be brave when you find something that you love.” Warren shared about understanding the courage it took her to keep going, that “the greatest success of all is that I never gave up.”

There will be hard times, she added, “Hard times are okay—as long as you do it in a good way, you will [always] know where you don’t want to be. It is not always easy, keep following with what is right [for you], the value that you bring has no price. And never work so much that you don’t have time for beading.”