Marie-Pierre Beauvais receives the Marie-Hélène Roger award!
Marie-Pierre has been helping out at CPAWS Quebec for nearly five years. She has collected hundreds of signatures for our protection campaigns, increased public awareness about the importance of conserving nature, written and posted many documents online, entered data, etc. Marie-Pierre has eyes that sparkle and a heart overflowing with generosity. Efficient, motivated, intelligent and informed, she is worth ten volunteers! She is so passionate about the environment that she has decided to make it her career. She is currently studying ecology, so that she can share her passion with her future students when she is a professor! For the invaluable help that she has provided CPAWS Quebec, for her devotion and enthusiasm, we thank Marie-Pierre with the title of volunteer of the year!
About Marie-Pierre Beauvais
Marie-Pierre is a bioecological technician, and is currently pursuing her bachelor’s degree in geography at Université de Québec à Montréal. Nature has always had a special place in her heart; growing up in the country, she became aware of the complexity of natural ecosystems at a very young age. After establishing the first Comité vert (Green Committee) at Cégep de Joliette, and discovering a burning passion for environmental issues, she moved to Montreal to further her education in biology. Since then, she has held down multiple jobs in the environmental domain and participated in a wide array of NGO civic action projects, all while pursuing her university education in geography and conservation. She dreams of transmitting her passion for biodiversity and environmental matters to future generations of students.
Why the Marie-Hélène Roger award?
Marie-Hélène Roger was an active volunteer from the very beginning of the Montreal group's activities in 1999. She manned our first information booth at a nature fair, coordinated the production of our first information brochure, and in 2001 helped organize our first-ever Annual General Meeting. She was elected to the Board of Directors at that first meeting and remained with it ever since, acting during part of that time as board secretary and member of our community outreach committee.
Her most remarkable contribution however, was undoubtedly as our social quarterback. Attendance at CPAWS-sponsored events was regularly boosted by the participation of her wide circle of friends, and she was the one Board member who would pry us once in a while out of our conference rooms to gather for an 'at-home' meeting instead. Her energy and optimism were inspiring, given the time she also committed to representing Quebec at the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation - and to her own courageous struggle with that disease over the years.
One couldn't help but be amazed at her determination. She considered it nothing special arriving to take minutes of a meeting with an oxygen tank on her shoulder and a breathing tube under her nose. Marie-Helene simply shrugged it off, nearly making the rest of us forget about it too.
Still, over the past year she suffered from increasingly frequent complications, and last summer was placed on a waiting list for a lung transplant. She was at the top of that list when she died on Monday February 23rd 2004, at the age of 29.