Profile: Starr Peardon, Courage to Come Back Award winner
Posted March 30, 2010 7:34 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The Courage to Come Back Awards will be handed out in just over a month’s time, recognizing those who have overcome illness, adversity or injury. We have a six-part series profiling this year’s winners, starting with a look at a woman who beat addiction and now helps others with similar struggles.
From dealing drugs and robbing gas stations to turning her life around and helping women just like her, Starr Peardon’s battle with addiction has truly been a full-circle journey.
She came from a poor family of 12 kids where drinking was simply a way of life. “We celebrated with drinking, we were sad with drinking so when a child grows up in those kind of circumstances that’s what you do.”
It was during one particular stint at the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women where she had an epiphany of sorts.
“I was able to hear the other women I was incarcerated with and their pain and it came to me that there’s always somebody with a worse story than you have.”
The 58-year-old credits her turnaround to finding God while behind bars and being handed a pamphlet by the chaplain who prayed for her. “It was about this woman who was helping women come out of prison and they built this place and she trained them and I said ‘that’s what I want to do.'”
And that’s exactly what she did. Nearly ten years later Peardon’s Talitha Koum Society, a series of recovery halfway houses, has helped countless women learn to move on from their troubled pasts.
News1130 is a proud sponsor of the Courage to Come Back Awards.
