Carol COWAN’64 has an extraordinarily long list of credentials as a leader in health and welfare. What has catalyzed her is not a longing to rise to the top, but more a burning desire to jump in and help. She always felt viscerally that life was unfair to many. In working hard to change that, she was elevated by those around her. “I am just being me,” she says. “I feel compassion and believe in excellence; this combination has led me to leadership roles, all in the best interest of making a difference.”
And what a difference she has made. Despite her own personal tragedies, she has helped improve the lives of countless children, teens and adults at ground level by being a caring and tireless social worker and then psychotherapist. And at a higher level, she has changed lives by creating better pathways through the health-care system, leading hospital boards and foundations, defining and defending professional standards, and volunteering in numerous ways that increase justice and equity. “I just can’t stand suffering,” she says. “I just can’t.”
To name a few of her achievements, Carol is past chair of the Women’s College Hospital Board, past chair of the hospital’s current and former foundations, past chair of the Crèche Child and Family Centre (now the Child Development Institute), and past director of Sunnybrook and Women’s College Health Sciences Centre. Most recently, she was a director of the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital Board. She has even been a director of the National Ballet School of Canada.
Within her own profession, Carol served as the president of the government-appointed Transitional Council established to develop the College of Registered Psychotherapists and became the founding president of the College of Registered Psychotherapists and Registered Mental Health Therapists of Ontario. Currently, she serves on the discipline committee of the college and has also maintained her own private practice for the past 30 years. And as a passionate believer in trying to improve the mental health-care landscape, Carol chairs a group set up to establish Eli’s Place, a farm-based residential treatment centre that will help adults aged 18 to 35 who have been diagnosed with serious mental health issues.
Where did all this determination come from? Carol says she absorbed so much from Branksome—which she attended from Kindergarten to Grade 13—including the values she internalized and the critical lessons she still carries with her. “I took from Branksome a belief in myself and the necessity of always considering others. Those have been the guiding goalposts that have shaped the rest of my life,” she says.
She remembers with clarity and warmth the hallways, the laughter, the field days, the Slogans (still in her basement) and the friends she made. She tries to “Keep Well the Road.”
Carol’s parents helped to teach her that the world is made up of “haves” and “have-nots,” and that she was one of the “haves.” When she was seven or eight, she says, her family took a driving trip to the southern U.S., including visits to impoverished communities. “My parents wanted to be sure I understood that people lived in shacks and lived off nothing and that that inequity was not all right. I just had this profound feeling from then forward that I wanted to make it more equal.” Her mantra is “Work hard for those who have little voice—the monetarily impoverished, physically disadvantaged and challenged, women and immigrant populations.”
While still in high school at Branksome, she spent a summer working with disabled children. She also volunteered to work with a charitable organization called Settlement House that was dedicated to supporting children from poor neighbourhoods. In the mid-1960s, Carol took a group of four little girls to the new City Hall buildings, which had just been completed. The girls stood in the vast, open square looking out at all the space in front of the iconic curved buildings. “I remember to this day one of the girls saying, ‘Is this the whole world?’”
Carol became a Clan chieftain and then a Prefect, much to her surprise. “Why did they want me? How did that happen? I never thought I was unique or special. I really appreciated everyone around me. I listened a lot, learned a lot. Cared a lot.”
After leaving the school, Carol obtained an undergraduate degree from York University and then a master’s degree in social work at the University of Toronto. She married Michael Levine and they moved to Africa, where Carol taught French at a high school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Once back in Toronto, she worked at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and then in front-line child welfare and the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto.
Carol had her first baby, Elizabeth, in 1976. Then, in 1979, she gave birth to quadruplets Peter, Alexis, Tamara and Katherine. The fourth of the babies, Katherine, was born with a complicated heart condition and had to have heart surgery. Tragically, Katherine died before she was six months old. This occurred during a terrible nursing scandal at SickKids involving baby deaths, and Carol was asked to be a parent representative on the inquiry led by Supreme Court Justice Charles Dubin. “Even then,” she says, “I just felt the need to make it better.”
When asked about her ability to carry on despite immense loss, she responds, “Purposeful activity has always been of enormous value to me. So that continued.”
As a mom raising young children, Carol proceeded through life in her altruistic way. She taught her children how privileged they were to have fresh air and clean water, summer holidays and exposure to spectacular countryside with lakes and blue sky, urging them to be pen pals to children caught up in war. She took on a foster child. She volunteered at Casey House Hospice. She joined the Junior Committee at the Art Gallery of Ontario and established tours for the sight impaired. A highlight from this time was meeting sculptor Henry Moore and arranging for people with sight impairment to enjoy his sculptures by touching them.
Carol’s energy caught the eye of leaders at Women’s College Hospital and she was asked to sit on its board of directors. “It felt like the right thing to do,” she says.
Career-wise, Carol decided to turn her focus to what she calls the mental health of well-being. “For me, social work was always about helping in concrete ways but also understanding the emotion of anxiety, trauma, depression, loss and grief. There was always some aspect that pertained to the mind.” She returned to the University of Toronto in 2006 and 2007 and obtained several post-graduate diplomas in advanced clinical practice with individuals, children and families. From there, she migrated to her own private psychotherapy practice.
“Her mantra is “Work hard for those who have little voice—the monetarily
impoverished, physically disadvantaged and challenged, women, and
immigrant populations.”
In 2009, she answered an ad in the Globe and Mail inviting applicants for the Transitional Council for the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO). “I’ve always argued that professional accountability is critical. I submitted my resumé. I was appointed and worked with a very special invested team of multidisciplinary thinkers,” she says. CRPO was formally established in 2015. Carol was first president of the Transitional Council and then president of the college. She celebrates and belongs to the regulatory bodies governing both social work and psychotherapy. “I really believe they both align and yet are distinctly different,” she says.
Carol suffered another horrific loss in 2016 when her daughter Tamara, 37, died by suicide. Bright, active and engaged in the world, Tamara had been overseas for four years working for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. When she came home, her struggles with a mental illness called paranoid delusional disorder became unmanageable and she fell through the cracks of the very health-care system that Carol had worked so hard to improve. “I was the one who was called by the police,” says Carol. “I went down to the yellow tape. I don’t think the grief ever leaves you. It is in the spot somewhere deep inside, you know? I wished I’d given myself permission to grieve more at the time. But you do it when you’re ready and, for me, when you feel you’re not going to fall apart.”
The following year, Carol’s essay on her daughter’s struggles, “Death by a Thousand Cuts: How an Army of Mental Health Professionals Let My Daughter Down,” was published in The Walrus. “There are legions of Canadians like me,” she wrote. “It is not just the patient who gets worn down by our fragmented mental-health system, but also the family members and friends who are on call 24/7.”
Carol’s personal journey through heartbreak, shame and guilt has put her on a parallel track with patients she has helped. “I guess what each of the deaths of my two daughters did for me was to help me understand the physical and mental anguish that death delivers,” she says.
Her journey has also provided an intimate look at resilience and healing. “In grief and tragedy,” she says, “some kernel carries us forward. Recovery is a process. Something provides a sense of well-being for a moment and then those moments build.”
Carol’s great pleasures over the years have been family, regular exercise, tennis and travelling to the far reaches of the world. She lives in midtown Toronto with her second husband, of 25 years, Allan Kaplan. Carol feels extremely privileged to have a big backyard surrounded by trees. Every year for the last 50, she has made her signature strawberry jam as a gift for friends and family, a tradition set by her mother. “These are the things that feed and nourish me,” she says.
Deservedly, Carol was honoured this year with Branksome’s 2023 Allison Roach Alumna Award. In nominating her, former classmate Dr. Frances SHEPHERD’64 said: “Carol has given her life to other people.”
Yet despite all she has achieved, Carol insists she’s quite ordinary. She likens herself to the person described in the first stanza of For Those Who Fail by 19th-century American poet Joaquin Miller.
“All honor to him who shall win the prize,”
The world has cried for a thousand years;
But to him who tries and who fails and dies,
I give great honour and glory and tears.
“Not a star,” she says, “but someone who worked hard.”
