Lunar New Year: Catalyst Award Recipients Marion Man and Scott Shaw
January 21, 2025
To say that Marion Man and Scott Shaw embody the spirit of Lunar New Year — a time to give back to the community and help those in need — is a huge understatement.
As the recipients of this year’s BC Cancer Foundation Catalyst Award, presented to honour an outstanding contribution of time, leadership or financial support, their extraordinary generosity easily ticks all three criteria, and is a year-round philosophy for the Vancouver couple.
Marion was a social worker in Vancouver’s Chinatown for more than 30 years and is a successful businesswoman and Scott is the co-founder of Sutton Group, the largest real estate brokerage in Canada.
Both are champions of social change. Their benevolence casts a wide net and includes founding and serving on charitable organizations that provide life-enriching senior programs, family reunification, entrepreneurship training to empower people who face barriers to work, and COVID-19, disaster and wildfire relief. As leaders, they inspire their communities to make a difference.
In addition to their unwavering service, they’ve donated major gifts to numerous health care and hospital foundations in the province, including significant support to the BC Cancer Foundation to fuel innovation in cancer prevention and early detection research at BC Cancer.
Following Scott’s own personal experience with lung cancer screening, Marion and Scott were highly motivated to support BC Cancer’s world-leading lung cancer research. They generously matched donations allowing BC Cancer’s Breathomics Lab to acquire cutting-edge equipment. This technology is now enabling the team to study thousands of breath samples to detect early lung cancer and understand how changes in the lung microbiome may indicate lung cancer development in never smokers.
After Scott’s sister in Taiwan was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer, they took a special interest in BC Cancer’s Dr. Stephen Lam’s groundbreaking work in discovering how air pollution causes lung cancer in women of Asian descent, a population in which cases have significantly increased over the years.
More recently, they have also supported BC Cancer research in Circulating Tumour DNA (ctDNA), an emerging tool in gastrointestinal and others cancers, that uses a simple blood test to detect tiny DNA fragments from a patient’s cancer to provide insight into potential treatment.
“Early detection is key to saving lives, and supporting the BC Cancer Foundation allows us to help ensure more people are diagnosed at a time when treatment can make the biggest difference. By investing in this research, we are giving hope, and a better chance for a healthy future, to people facing cancer,” say Marion and Scott.
They hope to inspire others to support families in B.C. facing cancer and raise awareness for the groundbreaking work taking place at BC Cancer, saying, “We really believe in the ripple effect. Individuals stones we throw in the water may be small but the ripples they produce travel great distances.”
As true as the pebble-in-the-pond sentiment is, it again downplays Marion and Scott’s extraordinary wide-impacting support of BC Cancer. A better metaphor for their philanthropic endeavours might include a monolith, a continent-spanning ocean and a tidal wave.
This Lunar New Year, join the BC Cancer Foundation in recognizing leaders in the community who are making a difference in the lives of people in B.C. facing cancer by donating today.
