What do you think?
Rate this book
A Knapsack Full of Dreams: Memoirs of a Street Nurse
"My nurse hands once did more useful things. They immunized the fat, healthy thighs of infants, they carefully measured cardiac drugs to administer to young heart patients, they bathed both the elderly lady after her surgery and the 24-year-old Italian-Canadian woman after her death. My hands once mixed linseed poultices, rubbed twenty backs a night before darkness fell and, by flashlight, checked intravenous drips, catheters, and other tubing. They made hot milk in the middle of the night and then, later at home, soothed a child with too-frequent earaches.
These are good uses for hands.
Now they carry a black bag into streets, alleyways, and ravines. The bandages I carry no longer cover the wounds of my patients. My vitamins will not prevent the white plague of tuberculosis from taking another victim. The granola bars I carry cannot begin to feed the hunger I meet. I cannot even help someone achieve one peaceful night of safety and sleep. Only roofs will do that. And I am not a carpenter."
There is no right to shelter or housing in Canada.
Over the past three decades, a series of federal governments cut funding for social programs and eliminated our national housing program, leaving hundreds of thousands of people victim to the tsunami of homelessness that was declared a national disaster twenty years ago. No one knows this reality better than Cathy Crowe, who witnessed the explosion of homelessness across Canada while working as a Street Nurse. This fallout was accompanied by great suffering, inhumane shelter conditions, new disease outbreaks, and clusters of homeless deaths.
It is a reality that spans across the entire country.
In A Knapsack Full of Dreams, Cathy Crowe details her lifelong commitment as a nurse and social justice activist-particularly her thirty years as a Street Nurse-with passion, grace, and fortitude. Presented through the lens of someone dedicated to the power and beauty of film, A Knapsack Full of Dreams will move you, then inspire you to act....
These are good uses for hands.
Now they carry a black bag into streets, alleyways, and ravines. The bandages I carry no longer cover the wounds of my patients. My vitamins will not prevent the white plague of tuberculosis from taking another victim. The granola bars I carry cannot begin to feed the hunger I meet. I cannot even help someone achieve one peaceful night of safety and sleep. Only roofs will do that. And I am not a carpenter."
There is no right to shelter or housing in Canada.
Over the past three decades, a series of federal governments cut funding for social programs and eliminated our national housing program, leaving hundreds of thousands of people victim to the tsunami of homelessness that was declared a national disaster twenty years ago. No one knows this reality better than Cathy Crowe, who witnessed the explosion of homelessness across Canada while working as a Street Nurse. This fallout was accompanied by great suffering, inhumane shelter conditions, new disease outbreaks, and clusters of homeless deaths.
It is a reality that spans across the entire country.
In A Knapsack Full of Dreams, Cathy Crowe details her lifelong commitment as a nurse and social justice activist-particularly her thirty years as a Street Nurse-with passion, grace, and fortitude. Presented through the lens of someone dedicated to the power and beauty of film, A Knapsack Full of Dreams will move you, then inspire you to act....
- GenresNonfiction
354 pages, Paperback
Published June 26, 2019
10 people are currently reading
187 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 9, 2024
Incredibly moving. I cried frequently reading this, especially when I heard how hard Cathy fought for homeless right and was essentially spit on by politicians and supposed leaders in the community. This book should be taught in every nursing school in the country to show the all nursing is political. Cathy Crowe is a national treasure and deserves to go down with the likes of Florence Nightengale and Mary Seacole as one of the most influential nurses of all time.
December 11, 2019
This is not a review but is based on an interview I had with the author. It was originally published in the Georgia Straight newspaper.
For more than four decades, Cathy Crowe has walked a tightrope, balancing work as a street nurse in Ontario with hardline activism that's often positioned her at odds with every level of authority.
Through the 1990s, Crowe butted heads with the Toronto Police Service over officers’ use of force against people living on the streets. In the early-2000s, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis among Toronto’s homeless population and she rallied a campaign to break the government from inaction. In 2002, she helped organize a hidden-camera sting to reveal shocking conditions inside a church that was sheltering the homeless without adequate resources.
“We went into one of the church shelters on that winter night and saw a hundred bodies just lying on the mats on the floor, sixteen inches away from each other in a dark, airless room,” Crowe writes in A Knapsack Full of Dreams: Memoirs of a Street Nurse.
The book shares a full life. But without a doubt, Crowe tells the Straight, if she could relive just one day of her career, it would be October 8, 1998.
“I was watching television, watching the news of the ice storm in Quebec and eastern Ontario,” Crowe recounts of the months leading up to that date. Working as a street nurse at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, she knew that the number of street homeless in Toronto and neighbouring cities had increased substantially in recent years. “We were seeing horrible, overcrowded shelter conditions,” she says. Now many of those people were stuck in the path of one of the deadliest winter storms the province had ever experienced.
Crowe and other activists established the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC) and then used it to build a large coalition of groups that would support TDRC’s call for governments across Canada to declare homelessness an official and, crucially, man-made disaster.
On October 8, 1998, “we had 150 endorsements...we held a press conference, and then we marched,” Crowe recounts.
When they made it to Toronto Metro Hall, their numbers and momentum were so great that security was helpless to stop the group from forcing its way into council chambers.
“And immediately, the committee passed a motion,” Crowe says. Other cities followed suit, and then the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Big City Mayors’ Caucus were convinced to endorse the declaration.
A few months later, in early 1999, Canada’s federal government created the National Homelessness Initiative and then established the Supporting Community Partnerships Initiative.
“That all came out of that. And it wasn’t just Toronto. It was all across the country that people were doing this work,” Crowe says fondly. “That’s when you have what I call ‘movement muscle’, when you can pull things together like that.
“That was the moment in my career that changed me and, I think, made a difference,” she adds.
A Knapsack Full of Dreams, which was published with FriesenPress last June, is a wonderful mix of Crowe’s adventures as a street nurse, an account of her tireless efforts as an activist, and an urgent call to action on homelessness across Canada.
Crowe notes that, sadly, its publication could not be more timely.
“Twenty-five years ago, I never would have expected homelessness to be worse than it was when I first started this work,” she says. “After all the advocacy and inquests, et cetera, homelessness is worse in pretty much every community.
“More tent cities are erupting and being squashed," she adds. "There are more new disease outbreaks, there are more homeless deaths at a younger age. And it’s no longer just Toronto and Vancouver, any longer. It’s everywhere.”
The book emerged from a difficult time in Crowe’s life.
Crowe helped pioneer health care for the homeless and has decades of experience as a nurse. She also holds multiple honorary doctorate degrees and in 2018 was appointed as a member of the Order of Canada. But from 2009 to 2013, Crowe couldn’t find a job and was forced onto Employment Insurance. She sent résumés to every nursing and teaching position she could find, but no one would hire her. “I was blacklisted,” Crowe says. Her reputation as an outspoken activist had come to precede her and no organization wanted to risk Crowe biting the hand that was feeding it. Eventually, she was hired for a part-time position at Ryerson University. But for those four years, it looked like activism had cost Crowe her career and life’s passion. That was when she decided it was time to collect her experiences as an activist and put them into a book.
“I’ve got to put this down to paper so that there’s something left behind,” she says she thought. “It could teach people things.”
For more than four decades, Cathy Crowe has walked a tightrope, balancing work as a street nurse in Ontario with hardline activism that's often positioned her at odds with every level of authority.
Through the 1990s, Crowe butted heads with the Toronto Police Service over officers’ use of force against people living on the streets. In the early-2000s, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis among Toronto’s homeless population and she rallied a campaign to break the government from inaction. In 2002, she helped organize a hidden-camera sting to reveal shocking conditions inside a church that was sheltering the homeless without adequate resources.
“We went into one of the church shelters on that winter night and saw a hundred bodies just lying on the mats on the floor, sixteen inches away from each other in a dark, airless room,” Crowe writes in A Knapsack Full of Dreams: Memoirs of a Street Nurse.
The book shares a full life. But without a doubt, Crowe tells the Straight, if she could relive just one day of her career, it would be October 8, 1998.
“I was watching television, watching the news of the ice storm in Quebec and eastern Ontario,” Crowe recounts of the months leading up to that date. Working as a street nurse at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, she knew that the number of street homeless in Toronto and neighbouring cities had increased substantially in recent years. “We were seeing horrible, overcrowded shelter conditions,” she says. Now many of those people were stuck in the path of one of the deadliest winter storms the province had ever experienced.
Crowe and other activists established the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC) and then used it to build a large coalition of groups that would support TDRC’s call for governments across Canada to declare homelessness an official and, crucially, man-made disaster.
On October 8, 1998, “we had 150 endorsements...we held a press conference, and then we marched,” Crowe recounts.
When they made it to Toronto Metro Hall, their numbers and momentum were so great that security was helpless to stop the group from forcing its way into council chambers.
“And immediately, the committee passed a motion,” Crowe says. Other cities followed suit, and then the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Big City Mayors’ Caucus were convinced to endorse the declaration.
A few months later, in early 1999, Canada’s federal government created the National Homelessness Initiative and then established the Supporting Community Partnerships Initiative.
“That all came out of that. And it wasn’t just Toronto. It was all across the country that people were doing this work,” Crowe says fondly. “That’s when you have what I call ‘movement muscle’, when you can pull things together like that.
“That was the moment in my career that changed me and, I think, made a difference,” she adds.
A Knapsack Full of Dreams, which was published with FriesenPress last June, is a wonderful mix of Crowe’s adventures as a street nurse, an account of her tireless efforts as an activist, and an urgent call to action on homelessness across Canada.
Crowe notes that, sadly, its publication could not be more timely.
“Twenty-five years ago, I never would have expected homelessness to be worse than it was when I first started this work,” she says. “After all the advocacy and inquests, et cetera, homelessness is worse in pretty much every community.
“More tent cities are erupting and being squashed," she adds. "There are more new disease outbreaks, there are more homeless deaths at a younger age. And it’s no longer just Toronto and Vancouver, any longer. It’s everywhere.”
The book emerged from a difficult time in Crowe’s life.
Crowe helped pioneer health care for the homeless and has decades of experience as a nurse. She also holds multiple honorary doctorate degrees and in 2018 was appointed as a member of the Order of Canada. But from 2009 to 2013, Crowe couldn’t find a job and was forced onto Employment Insurance. She sent résumés to every nursing and teaching position she could find, but no one would hire her. “I was blacklisted,” Crowe says. Her reputation as an outspoken activist had come to precede her and no organization wanted to risk Crowe biting the hand that was feeding it. Eventually, she was hired for a part-time position at Ryerson University. But for those four years, it looked like activism had cost Crowe her career and life’s passion. That was when she decided it was time to collect her experiences as an activist and put them into a book.
“I’ve got to put this down to paper so that there’s something left behind,” she says she thought. “It could teach people things.”
August 27, 2020
Cathy Crowe uses real examples from her work as a street nurse to emphasize why nurses in Canada need to look at the broader contexts of health in order to address health inequities and issues in our country, specifically homelessness. She explains how such a wealthy country like Canada came to have a homelessness disaster. She shows great leadership and advocacy skills in her various nursing jobs. She touches on how nursing school did not prepare her for real life nursing... for example, not teaching and encouraging advocacy and activism, and not including classes on politics and social justice. Cathy is an accomplished nurse and spent the majority of her career looking upstream for solutions rather than just treating the immediate problems.
Overall an interesting read. Kind of confusing to follow at times as she bounces around a lot. Also kind of repetitive.
Overall an interesting read. Kind of confusing to follow at times as she bounces around a lot. Also kind of repetitive.
January 24, 2021
To be honest this book was really hard to finish. But its a me problem because I do not like memoirs. I actually should hold this book in high regard as its one of the few I finished. Reading the book you can see how much Cathy is passionate in her advocacy for the homeless. She is very inspiring and her way to chalenge the status qo. It made me angry in the end as she was blacklisted and unemployed even after the amzing work she did. and having so many honorary works, I hope Cathy the best for the future.
September 29, 2024
All I can say is that as a nurse I have the upmost respect for Cathy Crowe and her efforts to truly end homelessness. I find it saddening that as a society we still cannot get in right and there are still men, women, and children sleeping rough across our country! I hope we can get it right soon before more people die from homelessness.
January 31, 2020
Excellent read, especially for nurses.
March 29, 2021
"Great nursing happens when the culmination of passion, power, and politics come together in the name of social justice."
May 4, 2020
Cathy Crowe is one of my professional hero's . She is insightful, compassionate and a fierce advocate for Toronto's vulnerable. I am full of admiration for this amazing nurse.
The book was a little different to what I had expected. It is a valuable book and one I would recommend nurses, especially those in Public Health, Community Care and Primary Care to read. However I was hoping for a little more of the personal stories, the personal challenges that people living on the street faced, more about their history, their specific health issues, their hopes and dreams for the future. That is all there in the book but not quite as much as I would have liked to see.
The book was a little different to what I had expected. It is a valuable book and one I would recommend nurses, especially those in Public Health, Community Care and Primary Care to read. However I was hoping for a little more of the personal stories, the personal challenges that people living on the street faced, more about their history, their specific health issues, their hopes and dreams for the future. That is all there in the book but not quite as much as I would have liked to see.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews