Some gifts keep giving long after the person who made them is gone.
This year, the Ottawa School of Art is proud to be part of Will Power, a national campaign helping Canadians understand how a gift in their Will can support the causes closest to their hearts, without taking anything away from the people they love.
There's no better way to show what that looks like than through the story of one of our scholarships, the Sheila Durno Memorial Scholarship.
Who Sheila Was
No one could tell this story better than the person who knew her best. Sheila's life-long partner, Peter Beyer, wrote the following tribute to her and to the artistic spirit that the scholarship in her name now carries forward.
Sheila Durno was a life-long visual artist, but not in the straightforward sense of someone who practices art as a profession. From her early teens until the end of her life, she constantly looked for ways to create beautiful visual things, and this in a wide variety of media. She studied painting and drawing; she trained as a ceramicist and a photographer; she tried her hand at stained-glass, fashion, quilting, and even teddy bears. She considered gardening as a form of artistic expression, fashioning earth, plants, and landscape into works of beauty.
She took courses and studied for diplomas; but she was also self-taught, combining formal training with personal exploration and experience. The point of art was for personal expression and satisfaction, but her works survive her and grace the houses and walls of friends, family, and some total strangers. She never became overly specialized, but moved from form to form, an artist of many beginnings and a few longer roads.
She had a predilection for the natural: natural objects, nature photography, organic gardening, especially working with 'dirt' (clay) and getting her hands dirty while creating. And she absolutely refused to distinguish between art and craft, between creative expression and practical use and application. Art had to be something that you appreciated, looked at, enjoyed, and even used every day.
Sheila and her artwork.
A Family's Decision
When Sheila died in 2016, her friends and relations, myself included, thought of ways that we might create a legacy for her, a way that her relation to the visual arts could be carried into the future and benefit others. Someone, I can't quite remember who, suggested, why not create a scholarship in her honour, something that helps others develop and carry forward their own artistic visions and talents, much as she was able to do.
Quite a few of us decided that this was a great idea and so we thought that the Ottawa School of Art would be the perfect place to do this, a locally based, community oriented, and longstanding school for all ages, interests, for all levels of skill and experience. And given Sheila's many beginnings, it seemed appropriate that the scholarship should be for students at the beginning, and so we decided to make this scholarship for first-year students.
That's how the Sheila Durno Memorial Scholarship came to be: not a formal bequest drafted by a lawyer alone in a room, but a decision made together by the people who loved her, built around exactly who she was. Today it supports first-year OSA Fine Arts Diploma students, artists at their own "many beginnings," just like Sheila once was.
Why This Is the Story We're Telling
It would have been easy for Sheila's family to simply grieve privately. Instead, they turned loss into something durable: a gift that supports new Ottawa artists to find their community year after year, long after any of us are here to see it.
That's the quiet power of a planned gift. It doesn't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to compete with what you leave to the people you love. A gift in your Will, even a modest percentage of your estate, can become someone else's education, someone else's first real shot at calling themselves an artist.
Before You Give, Make a Plan
If Sheila's story moves you, here's the honest truth: a legacy gift starts with a plan, not a cheque. That's exactly what the Will Power campaign is built to help with, providing practical, no-pressure tools to help you think through what you want your legacy to be. Explore their free legacy calculator that shows you what a gift to a cause like the Ottawa School of Art could look like alongside your other plans.
Ready to explore what your legacy could support? Visit WillPower.ca to start planning, and let us know if the Ottawa School of Art is part of that vision. We'd be honoured to talk with you about creating a legacy gift, just like Sheila's family did, for the next generation of Ottawa artists.
Contact Tammy Kohls, Development & Fundraising Officer, to discuss how to leave a planned gift to OSA in your Will.
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Donor Stories
A Gift That Outlasts a Lifetime: The Story Behind the Sheila Durno Scholarship
31 juillet 2026