Deciding on a career involves a hundred small decisions. Is the work fulfilling? Where can I do it? How much does it pay? What are the hours? On and on. But finding your calling is like any relationship: it just has to come naturally.

For Carefor Support Centre Supervisor, Michele Morgan, her career started as a part-time Administrative Assistant at the North Stor Seniors Support Centre in Finch when the building first opened in 1993.

She stayed there for over a decade, bringing her young children in to help with the activities for the seniors who visited the centre. However, in 2004, her curiosity about other career opportunities became too strong to ignore, so she got her insurance broker’s license and started working at an insurance agency, “because like everyone else you think there’s something better happening,” Michele recalls.

“You find out who you want to be and you be that person regardless.”

To say going from the social community of the North Stor Seniors Support Centre to an insurance agency was a change, is an understatement. “It was a lot of paper and a lot of busy time but not a lot of one on one with the client,” Michele says. “There was no feel good about it.”

She started to consider if she made the right move and when she was told that the person who replaced her at North Stor was leaving, she returned to Carefor. It was then that she understood how one’s life can’t be lived in compartments. To be one person in one place and another somewhere else is no way to live a life. “You find who you want to be, and you be that person regardless,” she says. “I thought that’s where I belong, and I’ll kick myself if I don’t apply.”

She also saw how working at North Stor wasn’t just part of her, it was a family. “My kids were born when I was there,” she recalls with a smile. “The most impactful time of my life was at the centre. That was my family. When I stepped outside of that, I saw wanting to be “more” wasn’t what made me feel good.”

Not long after returning to Carefor she moved from Administrative Assistant to Program Coordinator and then to her current position as Supervisor for both North Stor Support Centre in Finch and South Stormont Support Centre in Ingleside.

Looking over her career she sees how her work has impacted her and her family. “A lot of influence of who I am today comes a lot of seeing older adults every day,” says Michele.

As for her children, they’re now 29 and 24 and you can see the effect of years of volunteering and doing summer jobs and coops at the centre had on them with the elder being the Manager of Community Support Services for JW McIntosh in Williamsburg and the younger being a Personal Support Worker. “They started volunteering there at 5,” Michele recalls. “It was an amazing place to grow up. It takes a village…”

Looking back over her career she doesn’t regret the decisions she made along the way and recognizes how they helped her better know what’s important to her. “If you’re spending eight hours a day [at work] you have to be happy there,” she says. “I wouldn’t change the path of my journey. If I didn’t leave [Carefor] I would never had that revelation.”

To find out more about working at Carefor, visit our website.