Mary Burton is a community advocate, educator, systems navigator, and co-founder of Zoongizi Ode Inc. With more than 30 years of experience helping families navigate complex systems, Mary has built her career around advocacy, community systems literacy, family reunification, and creating pathways for people to advocate effectively for themselves.
Much of Mary’s expertise comes from lived experience. After growing up in the child welfare system and later navigating it as a young parent and grandmother, she spent years helping family, friends, and neighbours understand legislation, communicate with service providers, and work their way through systems that often felt impossible to navigate.
Mary’s work is grounded in a simple belief: people should understand the systems that affect their lives and have the knowledge and tools to challenge them when necessary. A self-described “legislation geek,” she has a particular talent for translating policies, legislation, and bureaucratic language into information people can actually use. Her work has included advocacy and education related to child welfare, housing, income assistance, restorative justice, employment, and other systems that intersect with the lives of families and youth.
She is also a strong believer that lived experience is professional expertise. Mary has spent decades working alongside Indigenous families and communities, helping people move from surviving systems to understanding them, navigating them, and ultimately having a stronger voice within them.
Known for being direct, determined, resourceful, and difficult to intimidate by bureaucracy, Mary brings both humour and persistence to her work. She is constantly learning, asking questions, reading legislation, and finding better ways to help people get where they need to go.
Outside of work, family remains at the centre of Mary’s life. She enjoys journaling, colouring, spending time with her grandchildren, and learning from them how to slow down, have fun, and not take life quite so seriously.
“There were many things that stopped me from pursuing education, but I never stopped trying. I'm proof that it can happen. You can do it,” shares Mary Burton. She is the Executive Director and co-founder of Fearless R2W Incorporated. Burton is from Norway House, Manitoba and lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She works as an advocate and educator around Community Systems literacy and system navigation...
