The Cycle Bill Shields Set Out to Break
Safetynet exists because of Bill Shields. He started it in 2006, and twenty years later it has supported close to 10,000 families. But what it does every day — and what it is ultimately trying to fix — comes straight from the person who built it. Bill grew up in Willowdale in the late 1960s, raised by a single mother. He understood early what it feels like to go without, and to be on the outside of things other people take for granted. That stayed with him, and it shaped the work he chose.
He spent three decades in social services before Safetynet existed — working with children with developmental differences at the Salvation Army, then with agencies serving people experiencing homelessness, then nine years at the Children’s Aid Society in Toronto, including running a group home of his own. It was a long stretch of meeting families at their hardest moments, and of watching the same hardship repeat from one generation to the next.
In 2003, Bill and his wife Rhonda moved to Oakville. It’s a prosperous community, which can make the people struggling within it easy to miss. Bill noticed anyway. He could see the need was real, just quieter than what he’d known in Toronto, and he wanted to do something about it directly.
In 2006, that became Safetynet — at first just Bill, part-time, handing out clothing to people struggling financially in a local neighborhood. Building it was hard, and raising the money to keep it running was the hardest part of all. Funders wanted a track record he didn’t yet have. One company backed the work without being asked: Geotab, who has remained a significant supporter ever since. In those early days, that support mattered as much for the confidence it gave Bill as for the funding itself.
Bill and his son Billy
What Bill set out to do was never just hand out clothes.
The clothing, housewares, furniture, diapers, and other free essentials are there to lift families out of immediate crisis — the constant scramble that leaves no room to think past the week. But getting out of crisis isn’t the same as escaping poverty for good. In the time Bill spent working in the field of social services he observed that poverty is generational and that families he worked with lacked an education.
That’s why Safetynet also offers free weekly tutoring. The tutoring matters most to Bill. A child who keeps up in school has a genuinely different future than one who falls behind — and for Bill, helping a child succeed in their education is what changes a family’s path for good and breaks the cycle of poverty.
Bill also felt that money should not be a barrier to a child who has an aptitude or interest in music. Growing up with music played an important part in Bill's life, so the music program was started to support children who had an interest in music, but whose parents could not financially support the lessons.
Recognition came along the way. The three Oakville Rotary Clubs jointly presented Bill with the Paul Harris Fellowship Award in late 2017, and in 2022 he received the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Pin for outstanding service. Neither changed how he works.
Bill still lives in Oakville with Rhonda. He has four children and is pictured here with his youngest, Billy. Twenty years on, he is still at it — driven by the same goal he began with: to help as many people as possible, and to give children a real shot at a different future. Find out how you can be part of this incredible journey.
