Shelly and Randy are the 2020 recipients of the inaugural Logan Boulet Award distributed at this year’s Honouring Canada’s Lifeline, an annual recognition event hosted by Canadian Blood Services which celebrates exemplary donors, community leaders and volunteers for their generous contributions and commitment to Canada’s Lifeline.
The Logan Boulet Award recognizes organ donors and donor families, those who so selflessly share their stories, raising awareness about donation and the powerful impact it has for patients and their families in Canada.
The Logan Boulet Award is named in honour of a young man who made the decision to be an organ donor just weeks before his tragic passing as a result of the tragic Humboldt Broncos bus crash in 2018. News of this donation inspired ‘The Logan Boulet Effect’, motivating 100,000 Canadians to register as organ and tissue donors in the weeks following.
Logan’s parents Bernadine and Toby Boulet participated in this year’s Honouring Canada’s Lifeline virtual event. Logan’s family continue to share their story, making an essential contribution to nationwide public awareness of organ and tissue donation.
Shelly was the first person in Nova Scotia to undergo medical assistance in dying and become an organ donor. At a time when many of us would look for privacy, Shelly and Randy opened up their lives to strangers so that they might learn more about end of life compassion and the gift of organ donation. She was passionate about educating health professionals and the public on all of these issues. Shelly and her family bravely and selflessly invited us to chronicle their journey over many months through her end of life process and subsequent organ donation. Her gifts saved three lives. Her story is told in the documentary, Her Last Project, which can be streamed on CBC GEM.
“I think she’d be pleased that it’s getting out there, getting heard, having people talk about it,” shared Randy while reflecting on the documentary at the awards ceremony, “What it did was reinforce what [Shelly] had spent the past 10 years trying to teach me: ‘it’s not about you.’ Think of others, don’t think of yourself.”
In the face of tragedy, donation is a tiny light in the corner of a family’s grief. A tribute to families who have made the decision, whether that decision led to successful donation or not, that decision is a give of life and hope and deserves to be honoured.
Honouring Canada’s Lifeline (HCL) is an annual, national event recognizing some of the country’s most dedicated people at the heart of Canada’s Lifeline.
Each year, it takes hundreds of thousands of blood donors, stem cell donors, organ and tissue donors, financial donors, employees and volunteers — as well as thousands of community and corporate groups and partners — to save the lives of patients across Canada. Honouring Canada’s Lifeline is Canadian Blood Services’ opportunity to recognize the many contributors along that path.
Her Last Project 