News

Newly named General Manager loves
the people part of her job

March 15th, 2018

Points West Living Red Deer’s new General Manager isn’t new at all. In fact, Tracy Sutherland has been involved since the PWL Red Deer first opened in the summer of 2016. She began as Hospitality Manager and has been putting her experience in hotel customer service to great use ever since. 

Well grounded...

Tracy Sutherland grew up in Bowsman, a tiny Manitoba village close to the Saskatchewan border. She lived with her mother but spent a lot of time with both sets of grandparents. Her maternal grandparents farmed and ran the local stationery store in town. And she was close to her paternal grandmother, a Dutch war bride. With all that family around, including cousins, aunts, and uncles, Tracy felt well grounded in Bowsman, but as soon as she graduated from high school, she was ready to spread her wings.

First job in Red Deer

Those wings took her to Alberta where she landed her first job in Red Deer, working the drive-through window at Arby’s. Tracy gravitated to the hotel industry, where she started as a front desk clerk and worked her way up to manager. She stayed in that industry for 22 years, half of it in management positions.

“If something needed to get done, I would do it,” Tracy says. And that attitude, along with a genuine desire to connect with people eventually led to her joining Points West Living as a ‘Hospitality Manager’ when PWL Red Deer opened in 2016. In the fall of 2017, Tracy was named Interim General Manager, and in January 2018, she became PWL Red Deer’s General Manager.

Mandated to build relationships

“What I like best here is the fact that we are mandated to build relationships with residents,” Tracy says. “I can give and feel good about it.” At the moment she’s focused on making sure all of the Human Resources records are brought up to date, “and that’s the most challenging part of the job at the moment.”

I want them to know the good stuff...

Tracy’s long-term hopes and goals for PWL Red Deer are, “to build a community where people from Red Deer want to be here, to come and see us for any reason,” she says. “I want them to know the good stuff that’s going on around here.” In the short term, she says, “I’d like to know every person in this building. It is a priority for me; to be able to walk up to someone and let them know that I know who they are.”

Photo: At a recent residents’ art auction at PWL Red Deer, General Manager Tracy Sutherland purchased a painting done by memory care resident John Hebert. The piece is called Waterfall.