Shelley Murphy
Executive Director and Co-Founder of Adults in Motion.
Shelley has spent her career following the same question further than most people do: what happens to this person next?
She started at the front door. For ten years she was an intake worker at Family and Children’s Services of Waterloo Region — the person on the other end of the call when a family reached crisis. Then she and her husband Rodd opened their own homes. Over fifteen years, Phoenix Specialized Care took in high-risk teenagers from the Guelph foster system, and they helped raise more than forty young people.
Then those kids turned eighteen, and the supports stopped.
Adults in Motion opened in 2009 to fill that gap — one program in Kitchener, now four locations across southern Ontario plus Lubdub, a virtual program reaching people across Canada and the United States. Shelley has led it for sixteen years.
Her approach comes out of the disability rights movement rather than the charity tradition: nothing about us without us. Programs are built with participants, not for them. She and Rodd are also parents of children with exceptional needs, which is its own kind of expertise.
Shelley holds an Honours Bachelor of Applied Science in Social Work from the University of Guelph. She served eight years as President of the Beechwood North Home Association.
More from Shelley