Each year, YMCAs from across Canada recognize those who "without any special resources, status, wealth, or position, have demonstrated a commitment to peace through special contributions made within their community and globally".

This year Lynn Silverton of Grey Highlands has been awarded the YMCA Peace Medallion. 

Ms. Silverton said she was stunned by the honour, and did not feel that she alone deserved it, recognizing that "it takes more than one person to do what we need to do".  She believes in the power of positive thinking, and of bringing action into your own neighbourhood. 

"I always functioned under my Irish grandmother's favourite phrase 'Do unto others as you would be done by'. That makes it easier to promote and share a desire for Peace in our Time," Ms. Silverton shared with the Hub.

As one person described Ms. Silverton - "She gets things done or finds someone to do it."  It would be difficult to sum up eight decades of that kind of living into a single page, but here are some selections from the highlights shared her nominators.

"Lynn Silverton is an inclusive community leader who identifies and shares community-building tasks, challenges and opportunities rather than hoarding them. Her “You can help” message is inspiring because it reinforces the idea that we all own the pursuit of solutions to community problems.

She is able to operationalize this drive for inclusion through her chairmanship, within the last two years, of the Grey Highlands Peace Committee, the Grey Highlands Police Services Board, the Grey Highlands Seniors’ Advisory Committee and Grey County Cares; through Vice Chairmanship of the Grey Highlands Public Library Board; and through Presidency of the Flesherton-Markdale Legion and the Markdale Rotary Club.

As Chair of Grey County Cares (an organization raising funds and supplies in Grey County to help Ukrainian newcomers) and drawing on her own experience as an immigrant, Ms. Silverton has helped ten Ukrainian families to escape war and settle in Grey County.

Ms. Silverton finds opportunities for the Peace Committee to partner with other groups on projects. In October 2022 for instance, she took the lead in bringing together the Peace Committee, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Priceville), the Grey Highlands Public Library, the Old Durham Road Black Pioneer Cemetery Committee, JunCtian Community Initiatives and the Sheffield Park Black History and Cultural Museum to hold a community event in Priceville honoring an early Canadian Presbyterian abolitionist leader, Michael Willis.

She has been the instigator and coordinator of annual free Peace Lunches in Grey Highlands, sponsored by the Peace Committee and open to the public, that explore and encourage civic engagement. The 2022 Peace Lunch for instance, has as its theme “More Than Half of Us…”: The Civic Role of Women in Grey Highlands Past, Present and Future.

As Chair of the Grey Highlands Seniors’ Advisory Committee, Ms. Silverton successfully engaged the Committee in advocating for the adoption of the Grey County Age-Friendly Community Action Plan by the Municipality of Grey Highlands. Now that the Action Plan has been adopted by the Municipality, Ms. Silverton is advocating, through various committees on which she serves, for the full implementation of the Plan – thereby increasing the chances that Grey Highlands will be an inclusive and cohesive community.

By virtue of the many groups on which she serves, Ms. Silverton identifies issues of interest to several organizations and thereby creates links between these organizations to achieve what is now commonly known as “multi-solving.” For instance, her liaison work that produced a 2021 multi-sponsored commemoration of the lynching in 1870 of Flesherton native William Luke by the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama for teaching Black children raised community awareness of the history of its own Black settlers and contributed to a better understanding of anti-racism."

The YMCA Peace Medallion, created two decades ago by a small group of volunteers and staff at the YMCA of Fredericton, is a way to honour dedicated peace builders and to inspire others. Since 1987, some 2,000 individuals and groups across Canada have been recognized with YMCA Peace Medals during YMCA World
Peace Week.

Here at our Owen Sound YMCA, we have honoured 24 individuals and 13 groups from our community, who inspire us with their actions. A list of those recipients can be found on the YMCA website.

– photographs by Michael McLuhan