38 GEORGIANVIEW SPRING 2022
ALUMNI SPOTLIGhT
On Jan. 27, 2021, alumna Jocelyn Leworthy's kidney had a
police escort to London Health Sciences Centre.
As the OPP cruiser raced away, lights flashing, the 25-year-
old recovered in the transplant unit at Toronto General
Hospital after the three-hour surgery to remove it.
It wasn't the first time the Georgian graduate (class of
2015) donated a live organ. In October 2015, when she
was 19 and had just completed the Early Childhood
Education (ECE) program at Georgian, she donated a
lobe of her liver to an infant she didn't know.
"I was super invested and I was like, 'I want to do this,'"
she recalls. "I learned about the statistics of how many
people wait and how many people die waiting."
She recovered from the eight-hour surgery and saved a
baby's life.
Jocelyn's lifelong passion for helping children led her to
the ECE program at Georgian. She went on to earn a
bachelor's and master's degree and become a child life
specialist – a profession unfamiliar to many.
"It was when I was studying at Georgian that I came to
research different jobs in the early childhood profession,
which brought me to my child life specialist role with
Gilda's Club," says Jocelyn, who lives with albinism, a rare
condition that causes a lack of pigmentation in her hair
and skin, as well as a visual impairment that cannot be
addressed with corrective lenses.
She wishes she'd had a child life specialist in her
childhood to help with the psychosocial aspect of living
with albinism. In her role, Jocelyn focuses on play-based
interventions to provide psychosocial support to children
and youth who are coping with stressful life experiences
such as illness and disability.
Her work as a child life specialist at Gilda's Club Simcoe
Muskoka earned her a 40 under 40 in Cancer award for
her work with children living with cancer.
"It's an honour because I don't do my job with the hope
of recognition," she says. "I feel so much reward in
knowing that although I can't change what children and
their families are going through, I know there aren't these
types of resources in every community."
"It's unique support that I can offer. There are lots of
different psychosocial supports for families but they don't
do what I do."
Devoting
her life to
others
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Play-based therapy is a big part of what Jocelyn does with her clients as a child life specialist.
"I was super invested and I
was like, 'I want to do this,'"
