In honour of the memory of Kaya Firth, Zach Sutherland, and Eion Campbell
Two years ago, U of G students Kaya Firth and Zach Sutherland passed away in a tragic kayaking accident.
One year later, the Firth and Sutherland families wanted to give back and honour the memory of Kaya and Zach in a positive and constructive way. They founded the Choose2BeResilient scholarship, which awards $2,500 each to two post-secondary students based on their stories of resilience in the face of adversity and grief. The scholarship is now in its second year.
The foundation expanded the scholarship this year to award another student $2,500 in honour of the memory of Eion Campbell, a close friend of both families, who passed away from cancer this past January. The scholarship is open to any student who has shown resilience despite a serious physical or mental health challenge.
Jennifer Firth, Kaya’s mother and co-founder of the scholarship, told The Ontarion that Kaya and Zach “impacted so many people in such a positive way that we didn’t want their passing to end that, so this positive ripple effect came out of that initial response.”
And the response to the scholarship has been tremendous. Dozens of applications detailing personal hardship, tragedy, and grief poured in from Kaya’s local Georgetown community and throughout Guelph and southern Ontario.
“The idea started in our local community, [and] it completely took off. We got so many applicants, and they were so heartfelt that it helped us identify that this was a need,” Firth said.
Destigmatizing grief by confronting it
Following the tragedy, the parents of both Kaya and Zach — Jennifer and Duncan Firth, and Darlene and Jeff Sutherland — sought to confront their own grief at a societal level after seeing the impact of the grief process on the younger brothers of Kaya and Zach.
“It really became evident that our society’s approach to managing grief, particularly in young people, is lacking. We saw that there was this societal tendency [for youth] to either shut themselves down or to distract, and we know from ourselves that that wouldn’t work,” Firth said.
For the Choose2BeResilient foundation, a more constructive grieving process is about making it possible for grief to be present, allowing a period of time for “someone to not be okay before they are okay,” Firth said. She also noted that many students learned that lesson through the application process. “The scenes that emerged from the applicants is that they understand that [grief] is not something that can be bypassed; they’ve learned that [grief] is not something that can be pushed down and pushed aside or skirted around,” Firth said. Firth also notes that, for many applicants, it was the first time that they wrote about their experiences. And many, including the Sutherland and Firth family, paid their experiences forward, allowing the grieving process to open up from something personal and private to something collective and conscious.
“For us, this is part of our healing — it’s a way to give back,” Firth said.
Cover photo courtesy of Jennifer Firth