Eli’s Place is pleased to welcome Logan Seymour to our Board of Directors. Logan originally planned to become a healthcare provider, until a mental health crisis in her first year of medical school put her on the other side of the system.
That experience didn’t just redirect her career, it gave her a permanent stake in fixing what she’d lived through. Alongside more than a decade of experience across hospitals, government, and national suicide prevention initiatives, Logan brings something equally valuable to Eli’s Place: a firsthand understanding of where the mental health system fails people, and a steady belief that those gaps can actually be closed. As Eli’s Place moves closer to opening its doors, Logan is particularly excited to bring her background in quality improvement, clinical risk, and accreditation to help ensure its programs are built on both safety and compassion.
Turning Experience into Purpose
Logan began her medical training with the goal of helping others navigate illness and recovery, the same path many people drawn to healthcare take. Partway through her first year, she experienced a serious suicide-related crisis. What followed was a hospitalization, and an experience with the healthcare system that exposed exactly how many ways it can fail the people who need it most: long delays before she could get an intake appointment for follow-up care, a referral that was never even sent, and a system that, despite the people in it trying their best, simply wasn’t built to catch her.
She was 21, trying to make sense of what had happened to her and what to do next.
“I realized I didn’t want to provide healthcare,” she says. “I wanted to make healthcare better.”
That realization changed the entire direction of her career. She left her medical program and enrolled in a master’s degree in Healthcare Quality, Risk and Safety at Queen’s University, determined to learn how to fix the systems that had failed her rather than work within them unchanged.
Improving Systems, Supporting People
Logan’s career since has taken her through some of the country’s most complex healthcare environments. She spent time with Canadian Forces Health Services, the entirely separate healthcare system built for Canada’s roughly 70,000 active military members, where she helped to start a quality improvement framework and worked on initiatives tied to how military members disclose and receive support for suicidal ideation. From there, she moved into the Sexual Misconduct Response Centre, doing program management work with individuals carrying significant trauma.
Then, through what she calls sheer luck, an opportunity opened at the Mental Health Commission of Canada, where she became Manager of a suicide prevention program. She took a leave from the federal government to lead Roots of Hope, a community-led suicide prevention and life promotion initiative. As an Indigenous woman, Logan was able to bring the program to Indigenous communities across the country, an experience she describes as one of the most meaningful of her career.
She later worked as Director of Quality, Patient Safety, and Risk at a community hospital in Ottawa, staying close to patient stories tied to the mental health ward, before returning to the federal government, where she now advises on health services programs at a senior level.
“Advocacy has always been really important to me,” she says. “I want to help create systems that work better for people.”
Drawn to Eli’s Place
Logan first crossed paths with Eli’s Place years ago at a suicide prevention conference, where co-founders David and Deborah Cooper shared the story of their son and the vision it led them to build. Their presentation stayed with her, even as life moved her in other directions.
Years later, scrolling through opportunities on Charity Village, she came across a board position with Eli’s Place and immediately recognized it.
“I remembered their story,” she says. “I remembered their vision.”
Today, Logan serves on the Models Committee, where the focus has shifted toward providing board-level oversight as Eli’s Place’s future clinical and executive leadership shape its programs. She believes her background in accreditation, clinical risk, and quality improvement fills a gap on the board.
“It doesn’t seem like we have someone with that type of clinical background on the board right now,” she says, “and I’m really hopeful that I can share that piece.”
A Place to Heal
For Logan, Eli’s Place represents a chance to close a gap she has seen up close throughout her career: a place for people who need more than outpatient care, but who may not heal well in a traditional hospital setting.
“Not everyone is going to do well in a hospital,” she says, “but I love what Eli’s Place is doing, this idea of people being able to heal in a really natural way, through community and care.”
She believes healing looks different for everyone, but that everyone needs the same foundation to get there: a safe, supportive environment and people who genuinely care about their wellbeing.
Looking Ahead
When Logan was asked for a personal motto, she didn’t hesitate. It’s the same line she has etched into the back of her iPad: be your own reason to smile. It’s a fitting one for someone whose career has been defined by helping people find their way back to themselves, and it’s the same spirit she hopes to help build into Eli’s Place as it opens its doors.
Emma Little | Eli’s Place Peer Advisor
“I’ve chosen to volunteer with Eli’s Place because I wanted to ensure young people had a voice in the development of the program, and more importantly, I believe that Eli’s Place is going to transform the mental health system for young adults in Canada.”
Emma Little graduated with her Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California in 2022. Her focus was on Social Change and Innovation. She is working at the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto as an Organizational Development Specialist.
- Emma Little | Eli’s Place Peer Advisor
- Emma Little | Eli’s Place Peer Advisor
- Emma Little | Eli’s Place Peer Advisor
- Emma Little | Eli’s Place Peer Advisor
