Cathy Crowe

Cathy Crowe (born 1952) is a Canadian nurse widely known as Toronto's street nurse, a title first given to her in the early 1990s by a homeless man in the downtown neighbourhood where she worked. She trained at Toronto General Hospital, receiving a nursing diploma in 1972, and later earned a degree in nursing from Ryerson and a master of education in sociology from the University of Toronto. She works as an educator, author, filmmaker and advocate for homeless and poorly housed people, and in 1998 she helped found the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, which called homelessness a national disaster and promoted a One Percent Solution of added government spending on social housing. She ran twice for the Ontario New Democratic Party, wrote Dying for a Home and the 2019 memoir A Knapsack Full of Dreams, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2018.