Ask Caroline MacGillivray why she started Beauty Night Society, and shell tell you the story of playing a 14-year-old sex worker who overdoses in a short film written by a friend.
Ask her again, and shell recall one time when she was on shift as a volunteer at the WISH drop-in centre on the downtown east side, and a woman asked her what it was like to be a kid. The womans father had started raping her when she was four. At age six, he started selling her, and by 10 she was in foster homes.
Ask MacGillivray why she started Beauty Night, and shell relate one particular evening at WISH, when she came across a woman who had survived a truly bad day. The woman was trying not to cry. She had no interest in food. All she wanted was to get cleaned up. As MacGillivray sat nearby, she could see the woman emerge from the shower and begin to dry and curl her hair. Struggling to hold herself together, the womans fortitude cracked when the bruises made it too painful to lift her arms. She gave into her emotions, her body sagging. Thats when MacGillivray stepped in to help. Achieving something resembling an 80s perm and a 50s flip, the two women were in hysterics by the end. A bond had been formed.
Not known for her skill with hair tools, per se, MacGillivray could pull off a slick French braid, and before she knew it, her admin work at WISH (calling shelters and helping women fill in Bad Date sheets) was commandeered by women who wanted her beauty services. Feeling guilty about deviating from the task at hand, she approached the volunteer coordinator and explained that her new-found status as The Beauty Lady could be an opportunity to reach women in a whole new way. She was 28 at the time.
In 2000, she founded Beauty Night Society. It took six months of planning for the first event, which provided beauty services to impoverished mothers, at-risk youth, seniors and sex workers.
Now they hold four a week, around the city (including twice a week at 302 Columbia). The goal of each event is to bring women into a safe and empowering environment where they are treated with respect, learn life skills and experience a bit of pampering.
Called makeovers, theres actually very little makeup involved. MacGillivray says hair cuts, massage and acupuncture are most popular, with acupuncture being the top request due to its effectiveness as a natural pain management tool for women with a high tolerance to medication, due to their previous drug use.
Trained volunteers, in tandem with a network of health care volunteers and street nurses, make up a community that holistically treats more than 200 women a week. Foot care, exercise, journaling, manicures, goal setting, reiki, and, most importantly, listening, are on the program. The level of intimacy also creates opportunities to screen for undiagnosed illnesses such as diabetes, and reintroduces the women to touch.
I have heard some really profound things, like People are touching me and theyre not afraid to touch me, or People are touching me and they dont want anything from me, MacGillivray recalls.
Some women, in turn, find the strength to exit bad relationships. Others stay on as volunteers, or ultimately find career opportunities through other volunteer work set up by Beauty Night. One Jennifer Allan, founder of Jens Kitchen (a food and relief outreach program for survival sex workers (who sell sex to meet basic needs on the DTES) took a page right out of MacGillivrays book and ended up being nominated for the same 2010 Woman of Worth award.
The community support is overwhelming at times. MacGillivray says that an old story in WE Vancouver (fortuitously printed after she accidentally emailed a list of much-needed supplies to the newsroom, instead of just her volunteers) still results five years later in donations on her dads porch, often with photocopies of the original story attached.
MacGillivray chuckles that, yes, they have performed 16,000 makeovers, but her math is a bit dated. The program expanded to its current pace about two years ago and she hasnt recalculated since.
Im lucky enough to feel like Santa Claus 365 days a year because I have such a good team of people around me, she adds.
And that leads to the next Beauty Night chapter. Intersections Media, a non-profit that offers film, video and visual arts development for at-risk youth, has produced a new Beauty Night campaign, including five Beauty Night participant videos and photos, which will soon be popping up in neighbourhoods near you.
Ask MacGillivray why she started Beauty Night, as the conversation comes to a close, and you might hear her story about reading a Dear Abby letter aloud to her mother as an exercise when she was a child.
A man wrote in, thanking the advice columnist for saving his marriage. He had initially wanted to divorce his wife, and punish her in the harshest way possible in the process. Abby instructed the man to romance his wife treat her like gold for the next few months so when he finally left her, it would break her heart. Instead, after months of treating her better, his wife fell in love with him all over again and they were off to renew their vows on a second honeymoon.
MacGillivray noted, even then, that treating people better than what they were accustomed to could dramatically influence behavior.
So ask Caroline MacGillivray why she started Beauty Night. You'll find that the answers are all around you.
To become involved or donate, go to BeautyNight.org.
You can follow WE Vancouver's Kelsey Klassen on Twitter @KelseyKlassen.
