Sylvia Searles Elam made a positive impact in her community

December 22, 2020

While Sylvia Searles Elam distinguished parents provided the shining example for her work as a community builder, she never lived in their shadow, said Barbadian Minister of Innovation Science & Smart Technology Kay McConney at her close friend homegoing service in Suffolk County, New York on December 21.

“She blazed her own passionate trails and what stood out is that she made no distinction between her personal, professional and charitable life,” noted the former Barbados Consul General in Toronto in the virtual eulogy. “She lived her own truth, her absolute and unfettered truth as a humanitarian…The beauty of Sylvia was that the person you saw on the outside was exactly how she was on the inside. She lived who she truly was and that made her genuine to the core.”

Searles Elam passed away in Florida on December 9, six days before her 68th birthday.

Before migrating to the United States just over a decade ago, she was a Special Assistant to then Toronto Mayor David Miller.

“Sylvia was smart, effective and very accomplished indeed,” he said in a tweet. “She was also lovely and her loss is sad.”

Former Toronto Police Services Board Chair Alok Mukherjee collaborated with Searles Elam on several community projects.

“She was a strong comrade, a dedicated fighter against anti-Black racism and someone I was privileged to work with to make Toronto and this country a better place,” he added in a social media post.

Searles Elam worked with the City of Toronto for 16 years and held senior positions in Human Resources Management, Corporate Training & Development and Equity & Race Relations.

She established Access Metro, the public service centre for the amalgamated city government that used multilingual staff and technology to enable the public to obtain information on access to municipal services, developed and implemented multicultural programming for teachers and students through TV Ontario, the Ministry of Education and school boards, co-produced the National Film Board’s ‘Fields of Endless Day’ and assisted with the development of race and ethnic relations policies for several school boards.

In addition, Searles Elam developed internationally recognized management training programs and – under the direction of Zanana Akande who was at the time Parliamentary Assistant to then Premier Bob Rae – created and implemented the jobsOntario Youth Program.

She was appointed by the Ontario government to develop race relations training programs for the province’s police services and was the first Executive Director of the North York Committee on Community, Race & Ethnic Relations. She was also a founding director of Scarborough Community Legal Services, a Board member of Urban Alliance on Race Relations and the Black Business & Professional Association, Chair of the defunct FLOW 93.5FM Advisory Board and Vice-Chair of Rouge Valley Health Systems.

As a businesswoman, Searles Elam ran a health and nutrition company and was a founding director and independent distributor with Symmetry Corporation.

Two decades ago, her business grossed almost $1.5 million in retail sales.

Sylvia Searles Elam with former Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair (Photo by Ron Fanfair)

In her teenage years, Searles Elam served on the Contrast Junior Achievement Awards Committee chaired by historian Sheldon Taylor.

“Sylvia was a community person who followed the footsteps of her parents, mainly her mother and was very mindful of her culture that was more universal than local,” he said.

In the late 1970s, Searles Elam along with former IBM employee Tom Allen and Taylor went to New York to meet the Rev. Jesse Jackson who started the Rainbow Push Coalition.

“She thought the organization could be grounded in Canada,” added Taylor. “She made some valuable contributions.”

Searles Elam is survived by her husband of 17 years, Kenneth Elam, sister Marjorie and nieces Davleen and Trina.

Her parents, Kathy and Edsworth Searles, died in 2008 and 2009 respectively and older sister Kathleen Bailey passed away in September 2020.