Volunteer service is about representation and serving her community for AU nursing grad

Shelly Philip LaForest’s doctoral research builds on two nursing degrees and lived experience on the job

Many active volunteers will tell you they give of themselves because they’ve seen others like them volunteering and want to follow that example. But that’s not exactly the case for Shelly Philip LaForest.  

Growing up in Brampton, Ont., with two immigrant parents, she didn’t see a lot of people like her doing that kind of work. Her parents, for example, weren’t actively involved in volunteerism because “they were focused on survival.”  

“My parents did the best they could with what they had available to them,” she said. “I think it speak to being a Black immigrant in Canada during the time they were raising us.”  

This lack of representation is part of what inspires LaForest (Bachelor of Nursing ’13, Master of Nursing ’20) to be such an active volunteer with her kids, with her community, and with her profession.  

While she has often found herself being the only Black person in these spaces, that has only fuelled her passion. Much of her volunteer work, including being a parent volunteer on her kids’ field trips, taking on board governance roles, and her role founding the Ontario Black Nurses Network, has been about serving this community.  

“It’s just so important to show the kids these barriers can be surpassed, or you can overcome them,” she said. “You can face them. If I can open doors just by being in a space, then that’s what I’ll do.”  

This passion for giving of herself has earned LaForest the 2025 Volunteer Service Award, which recognizes an AU grad who has demonstrated a spirit of volunteerism and community service through unpaid involvement in and contributions to their community.

Opportunity for a gifted child  

As a child, LaForest said she didn’t understand that the colour of her skin would be a barrier to her. She was a gifted student, to the point that an elementary school teacher put her in charge of creating, administering, and marking the weekly math drills for her class—something her teacher did to keep her engaged with a curriculum that didn’t challenge her.  

The school board was just starting its program for gifted students when she was in Grade 3, and in that space, she found community with others who she felt thought the same way as her—eager to nurture creativity and explore academics. And as a parent, she has nurtured these traits in her own children.  

“It’s so important to nurture your brain, and I was given that chance through my schooling years,” she said. 

Understanding barriers to access 

It wasn’t until Grade 6 that LaForest first remembers experiencing discrimination, when a friend’s parents told her, “Don’t talk to this girl” because of her skin colour. Before that, she had never thought that somebody might think it mattered what she looked like.  

With the benefit of hindsight, she sees now she did in fact face barriers as a child—and continued to face barriers. But rather than accept those limitations, she has consistently shown up in spaces that aren’t always explicitly welcoming.  

For example, she decided one summer to rent an RV and go camping with her husband and kids. The girl working the counter said she’d never seen a Black family rent an RV, and while people in campgrounds weren’t unwelcoming, most other families in those spaces were white. 

And as a parent, she made an effort to volunteer for every single event in her kids’ classes that she could—which was challenging given her shift-work schedule that often made it challenging to attend daytime volunteer activities. This was just one way she made herself visible.  

It’s just so important to show the kids these barriers can be surpassed, or you can overcome them. You can face them. If I can open doors just by being in a space, then that’s what I’ll do.

Shelly Philip LaForest, 2025 Volunteer Service Award winner

Career growth in nursing  

Another place LaForest has chosen to make herself more visible is in the nursing profession. While she had considered pursuing pediatric medicine, she always felt like nursing was her calling.  

She graduated from George Brown College with a nursing diploma, which at the time was all that was needed to work as a registered nurse, and she was hired at the Hospital for Sick Kids (also known as SickKids) in Toronto.  

“It just fit. It felt great,” she said. “With nursing, you get to be immersed more and felt like there was more time to building trusting relationships with people at their most vulnerable times.”  

After about 10 years, LaForest noticed a colleague who was spending time marking papers on her break. This was an inspiration, and she looked into what would be needed to take on a teaching role. She found she’d need a university degree, but as she was working full time there weren’t many options for her.  

Learning opportunities in nursing  

Fortunately, that colleague told LaForest about AU’s post-diploma Bachelor of Nursing program, and she immediately found it to be a good fit: she could do the course work when her schedule allowed, she could pay for classes one at a time to minimize the financial challenges, and she could still do all the things she wanted to with her kids.  

“I could fit it in, and I truly enjoyed it,” she said. “It needed to be that way for me.”  

Finishing the bachelor’s degree opened new career opportunities for LaForest, who took on a role as a clinical instructor with Trent University, but she wasn’t finished with learning yet. After also taking on a leadership role with George Brown College, she realized that the people she was hiring were earning more than her because they had master’s degrees, and she knew that needed to be her next step.  

Having had such a good experience with AU, she chose to stick with it and registered for the Master of Nursing program, with a focus on teaching. And not long after finishing her master’s degree in 2019, she started work on a doctorate in interdisciplinary social research through Trent University while also taking on a new professional role as a professor at Centennial College.  

Lived experience as a nurse  

While LaForest was expanding her knowledge and education, she was still experiencing incidents that made clear to her that the colour of her skin was a factor in how people perceived her.  

One day, for example, she walked into the breakroom and heard a colleague describing her as, “that Black nurse,” and the room got suddenly very quiet when she entered.  

Another time she recalls someone had made a complaint about her demeanour, not considering the context that when she came into work every day, the images on the TV screens were of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a white police officer in 2020. 

And since then, LaForest has spoken to many other nurses who have had similar experiences where they felt powerless against the way people spoke and acted around them. 

Her experiences, and her desire to break down those sorts of barriers for other nurses, inspired her to found the Ontario Black Nurses Network, which has since grown significantly. 

“I started that because it was about finding nursing friends at the time. It’s nice to have a friend who understands your story,” she said. “That what it has evolved from, and it has been beautiful to see.”  

Today, the organization provides Black nurses and nursing students with professional development, networking, and scholarship opportunities, while recognizing excellence and the contributions of its members.  

Doctoral research serving the nursing community  

LaForest’s research, not surprisingly, focuses on the familiar themes of uplifting and supporting her community: she’s conducting a qualitative research study examining the subjective well-being of Black nurses in Ontario.  

Although her professors and supervisors encouraged her to expand the study to include the experiences of other marginalized groups, she was insistent that this specific work is important.  

Understanding the Black nurse experience, she said, includes understanding that this experience is going to be unique for this population. And to do that kind of research well, it needs to come from someone with a similar lived experience. 

“If you want that research to come from a Black researcher, we have to have Black researchers,” LaForest said. “But if the barriers are in the place to prevent you getting there, we’re not going to be tackling these topics.”

Meet Athabasca University's 2025 Alumni Award winners

Get to know other inspiring AU alumni from this year's award winners.