The Shawnigan Alum of the Year Award 2026

We are proud to announce Chloe Hunt ’09 (Groves’) as the inaugural recipient of the Shawnigan Alum of the Year Award.

Chloe is the founder of Fourwords Solutions Ltd., an organization dedicated to helping communities develop sustainable, community-led responses to sexualized violence. Her work focuses particularly on rural and remote communities across Canada, while advocating for Indigenous and under-represented groups whose voices have too often been overlooked.

Through Fourwords Solutions, Chloe is helping restore voice and agency to survivors of sexual violence and assault. Her approach goes beyond temporary solutions, prioritizing education, meaningful communication and long-term strategies that help communities build resilience and create lasting change. At the heart of her work is hope – the belief that communities can come together to support survivors, challenge harmful norms and create safer futures for women and girls.

Chloe’s work is a powerful reminder that meaningful change begins with dedication, passion and purpose. At Shawnigan, we are committed to ensuring that women are represented, respected and heard. Yet beyond our gates, that reality remains far from universal. Chloe has dedicated her career to confronting that gap and challenging the acceptance of sexual violence as an inevitable part of women’s lives.

Chloe’s work gives a voice to those who need it most, while helping individuals and communities find a path forward through trauma. In doing so, Chloe embodies the very qualities the SAY Award was created to celebrate: compassion in action, courage in the face of difficult realities, a commitment to community and the curiosity to seek better ways forward.

Through her leadership, advocacy and unwavering commitment to others, Chloe Hunt is helping to build stronger communities, greater resilience and a better world.

The Shawnigan community is proud to recognize Chloe as the inaugural recipient of the Shawnigan Alum of the Year Award.

The Advancement and Community Engagement team sat down with Chloe in July to learn more about her work and the impact she is making across Canada. 

I joined Shawnigan in Grade 10, and because I was accepted late, I was placed in a four-person room. It was a tight fit. Having grown up as an only child, going from having my own space to sharing a small room with three other girls was one of the best things that could have happened to me. Boarding life is built around community, and I had to learn not just how to live alongside people, but how to actually be part of a group. It was also my first real exposure to people from all over the world, and to the idea that everyone's background shapes how they see things.

Academics were never my strength, so I found solace in rugby instead, even though I wasn’t great at that either!. We practiced rain, shine, or snow. I'd never had to push through that kind of discomfort before, and it taught me the resiliency I was lacking. 

I went on to do a BA in Psychology at UVic, which led me into marketing and later web-experimentation. Throughout that journey I always volunteered in the gender-based violence sector, and I felt drawn to make a bigger impact beyond climbing the corporate ladder. Funnily enough, a good friend of mine met a Founder on Twitter, introduced me to her, and that changed everything. Through that company, I spent two years studying how evidence collection after sexual assault can be facilitated, which eventually led me to founding Fourwords Solutions and creating the paceKit.

Fourwords Solutions is a social enterprise dedicated to closing the gaps in Canada's response to sexual assault.

Of the estimated 940,000 sexual assaults a year in Canada, 96 percent lose DNA evidence, which can be critical to pursuing justice through the courts. Forty-one percent of hospitals and health centres cannot provide a forensic exam, the procedure typically used to collect that evidence after an assault. In rural and remote Canada, we estimate the number is much higher.

Founding a business and learning how to run a business is wild. But then, at the same time, it's a non-traditional business. So I'm not only trying to do bookkeeping, but I'm also trying to influence institutions and change the way something has been done for the past 40 years.

The sexual assault exam kit hasn't changed since it was first created. Trying to change something that hasn't changed in that long, when there's really no financial incentive for changing it, is difficult.

A close friend of mine tried to access support after experiencing sexual assault, and couldn't. Without the money to pay for counselling privately, she was facing a two-year waitlist for help from a non-profit that serves survivors. It made me realize we assume people will be cared for in their most difficult moment, but that's not the case. We rely on non-profits to support people in crisis, yet we don't fund them consistently enough to deliver that life-saving care.

We don't want to create anything for a community without them. Nothing for us without us, right?

Anytime that we are moving into a space, we work with the community. If the community feels that there's a need, then we help build out a program around the kits.

Something that's very essential here is that program, because not only do you need to be linking people with services afterwards, whether that's healthcare or counselling, but you also have to make sure that the chain of custody is maintained.

We're doing collections within a facility with trained staff members. We would work with a community to see what spaces would be best for these kits to live in. They need to be accessible, they need to be trusted, and they need to have staff members who can be trained. 

Then we would install the kits in those community spaces, whether it's a shelter, a women's centre, a friendship centre, or  a rural health centre. A person could go there, access the kit, complete the kit in that facility, have that trained staff member who can support them and connect them with services afterwards. Then that trained staff member also handles the kit and hands it off to law enforcement. That's the legal piece that's important.

Because this is entirely new to Canada, I've had to do a lot of outreach and an incredible amount of explaining about the kits. But now people are starting to come to me. 

In 2025, the paceKit was also referenced in two significant reports. The Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime's 2025 report, Rethinking Justice for Survivors of Sexual Violence, cited paceKit as a practical reform to improve access to evidence collection and justice for survivors who cannot access traditional forensic services. 

Then, Dr. Kim Stanton's 2025 Independent Systemic Review of British Columbia's legal system referenced paceKit in the context of bridging access gaps in evidence collection.

Things just keep escalating. 

I'm really hoping to have, in the next few years, some province-wide programs running. Right now we're in the pilot stages, but having even just one province commit to implementing this across the province would be huge. 

Then, honestly, in five years, I would love to have the start of some legislation in place to talk about supported self-collection. Right now there's no legislation that tells you who must collect evidence after sexual assault, which is great because it doesn't preclude people from doing it. But it would just be great to have this worked into legislation so it can never be questioned again. 

And I think that's very achievable. 

Trying to change a system that historically hasn't been discussed or prioritized can be long and challenging work. Hearing that other people think it's worthwhile, and worth recognizing publicly, is very validating. It gives me hope that all the long nights and weekends will actually help make a difference.

Dare to challenge the system. Shawnigan has given you a foundation of stability, so use it to go against the grain. Find other people who care about the same things you do, and push together against the systems that have more to gain from keeping things the way they are.