Alison Van Dyke enters her first term as a Medicine Hat city councillor, continuing years of community advocacy from within the walls of city hall.--SUBMITTED PHOTO
jtubb@medicinehatnews.com@ReporterTubb
Alison Van Dyke has been an advocating voice in the city for years. Now, she will be an advocating voice on behalf of the city as one of the six newly elected councillors this fall.
She says it’s been a bit of a transition from advocate to politician as the positions are quite different.
“The politician holds the ability to make those policy and procedure changes that the advocate is advocating for,” Van Dyke said. “So I guess in some ways it’s not a big surprise or that big of a transition that way. It’s just how you approach it I guess.”
Van Dyke grew up on a farm near Rattlesnake Dam, and now lives in Medicine Hat with her husband and two teenaged daughters. Her family moved to Medicine Hat in 1999 and except for four years when she lived in central Alberta, she has been a full-time Hatter. Even when she was taking religious studies in Saskatchewan, she always called the Hat home.
She worked at Hillcrest Church for six years until she had her kids, then she stayed home until they went to school and started back up working in non-profit and advocacy.
Van Dyke is currently the food security co-ordinator with Medicine Hat Community Foods Connections Association. Previously, she worked with Public Interest Alberta. She says she became interested food security when her kids were little and did a lot of research and reading on it. She says the CFCA isn’t like the food bank, which is emergency food provision, but are further up the food security continuum as they focus on food capacity.
“What we do is provide programming and education to try and prevent people needing food access or to help move them out of it,” Van Dyke said.
She says they also do policy work and follow the food and agriculture industry to see the impact on people’s lives at the community and household level and provide education of kitchen literacy on preparing food and how to cook healthy foods to save money.
“We’re just trying to help people be able to access affordable food more easily,” Van Dyke said.
Running for council was not something she ever imagined, but with recreation centre closures and decisions around electrical utilities, she says she was starting to be concerned about some of the decision making within the community. Van Dyke says people were really supportive of her running and it brought a lot of pressure to her campaign.
“In some ways it’s great to have that support but also, especially coming up that last week before the election, even the day of, you just feel honestly a tremendous burden of responsibility to all of these people who have invested their time, money, effort and volunteer work into your campaign and you want to make them proud,” Van Dyke said.
Before COVID-19 hit, she was on four boards and completed terms on two. Right now she says she is winding up her duties as the chair of Palliser Friends of Medicare, which she will turn over at the end of the November. She is also on the school council for her children’s high school which she will remain on as she says it’s important for parents to be involved in their children’s education.
Van Dyke says she likes to garden and bike the trails in the summer, and when the weather turns cold she takes up cooking and does cross stitch.
