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Despite delays and disappointments, the program accepted its first students in 2007. Now Butt is supporting the program and its students in a different way: through the Glenda M. Butt Bursary in Dental Hygiene for students entering the bachelor of dental hygiene program.

Butt explains that she was inspired by the Kate MacDonald Bursary Fund, which was created in honour of her great friend and mentor Kate MacDonald (MEd’77), director of the School of Dental Hygiene from 1969 to 1982.

“I always thought creating a bursary was a good idea and I often promoted Kate’s,” says Butt. “When I thought about putting money into a bursary fund myself, I really wanted it to support the direction I had worked so hard to achieve.”

Perseverance and persuasion were key

“Enthusiastic and persistent are the two words people come up with to describe me,” says Butt.

Both qualities were necessary during her efforts to make a bachelor of dental hygiene program available at AV���ֲ� – a process that began in the 1980s. While AV���ֲ�’s Senate approved the program that Butt and her colleagues built, a five-year provincial moratorium on new health programs brought the process to a halt.

Glenda Butt (DDH’69)

During the long wait for the moratorium to end, Butt succeeded in getting a degree completion program approved for AV���ֲ� dental hygiene students, enabling them to gain the additional credits needed to obtain a bachelor of science.

After that, it was a game of perseverance and persuasion to update the bachelor of dental hygiene program when the provincial moratorium ended.

“It was a struggle, and not everybody could understand why the degree was important, but we believed that it was the way of the future” says Butt. “With college programs across the country affiliating with university programs that would grant degrees, we were going to look like we were lagging behind if we didn’t do it.”

With that objective achieved in 2007, Butt retired, content that her successor would move the program forward. She spent the next few years travelling widely and helping to care for her mother, who had moved to Nova Scotia from Newfoundland.

But the idea of creating her own bursary didn’t go away. And when Butt met Dr. Leigha Rock, the then new director of the School of Dental Hygiene, at a reunion event in the Faculty of Dentistry in 2019, she “knew in five minutes that it was going to work”. Rock was “approachable and dynamic and she had an interest in research, which I thought boded well for the BDH program,” says Butt.