In their own image
Colleagues and friends were surprised when Alia Eyres quit her job as a corporate lawyer to work for Mother's Choice, the charity working with single mothers and crisis pregnancies. It seems a lot to give up considering the radical change in salary and nature of work.
[Alia Eyres, Class of 1995] Colleagues and friends were surprised when Alia Eyres quit her job as a corporate lawyer to work for Mother's Choice, the charity working with single mothers and crisis pregnancies. It seems a lot to give up considering the radical change in salary and nature of work.
But Eyres, who has also practised in the United States, says, 'It's no sacrifice. I am grateful that I got to work for something that I am passionate about.'
In taking over as the chief executive of Mother's Choice last month, Eyres isn't just fulfilling a calling, but also carrying on a family legacy - her mother Phyllis Marwah is among its founders.
Eyres was nine years old when her parents, Phyllis and Ranjan Marwah, along with an American couple, Gary and Helen Stephens, launched the organisation in 1987.
'Everybody was a volunteer then. They didn't know what they got themselves into. When we first got the building [on Bowen Roadl], it was full of rubbish and there were no windows. I came in after school every day to help pick up rubbish, clean and paint,' she says.
At the time, Marwah, 64, had a brood of six (which later swelled to seven) and all the children pitched in to turn the site - former military barracks which had been vacant for 16 years - into usable quarters.
The founders' mission was spurred on by news reports of a growing number of teenage girls going to the mainland for late-term abortions.
