Sita’s story: ‘My life has always been about nature’

The past year or so has been incredibly challenging, but even that hasn’t stopped our champions of nature from protecting wildlife and habitat. This week is dedicated to YOU, our supporters. Thanks for sharing your stories with us and inspiring future generations of environmentalists. 

For her entire life, Sita Jo-Anne Holland has always chosen nature.

Growing up, Sita had an “outdoorsy, animal kind of life.” Back home in Hudson, QC, and later Thunder Bay, ON, her dad would often tend to injured ducks and chipmunks. Sita, too, can’t resist an animal in need. “I once saw a bird that had swallowed a fishhook and helped remove it,” she says. “The bird looked at me and paused — as if to say thank you.”

Sita raised her daughter in Thunder Bay, working as an elementary school teacher. At age 40, she decided to make a career change and studied to become a registered massage therapist. Setting her own work hours gave her the freedom to spend more time with her family and in the wilderness, surrounded by the moose, otters, mink, lynx, wolves, bears and other wildlife she loves.

And if she had to choose between her car and canoe, she’d choose her canoe every time. (It’s a really good canoe!)

Some of her most heroic acts are the simplest. Now in her seventies and happily retired, when Sita was considering the legacy she wanted to create, it was an easy decision to choose nature once again by leaving a gift in her Will for WWF-Canada.

“Why not do it?” she thought, after receiving a brochure. A monthly donor since the late 1980s, Sita sees leaving a percentage of her estate to WWF-Canada as another way to give back and extend her love of nature. Though she doesn’t know how much she’ll have in the end, Sita says she trusts that WWF-Canada will put it to good use.

Sita is passing down her love of nature in more ways than one — both through a gift in her Will and by planting milkweed for monarch butterflies in her native plant garden with her grandchildren.

With a champion for nature like Sita by our side, WWF-Canada will continue to protect and restore nature — for wildlife, our climate, and so future generations can also experience an “outdoorsy, animal kind of life.”

You can help safeguard the future of wildlife. Please remember WWF-Canada with a gift in your Will, or estate plan. Discover how you can create your conservation legacy. Visit legacy.wwf.ca or call us at 1-800-267-2632.