About NSLA
No Stone Left Alone Memorial Foundation is dedicated to honouring and remembering Canada’s veterans. Our unique ceremony provides students and youth with an authentic experience that creates knowledge, understanding and appreciation of those who serve and of the sacrifice of Canada’s fallen.
Our Mission
To honour the service and sacrifice of Canada’s military by educating and inspiring youth to place poppies on veterans’ headstones.
Our Vision
Our youth, honouring Canada’s veterans through personal acts of remembrance, gratitude and citizenship, every year, forever.
Download a PDF of our detailed timeline and history of No Stone Left Alone.
Our Origins
Lillian Mary bianchini (nee hidson)
In 1971, a child of twelve was having a discussion with her mother who was very ill and near death. Her mother, who was a veteran, stroked the child’s head and asked her not to cry and to try not to forget her on Armistice Day. Through her tears, the young girl looked into her mother’s eyes and nodded, not even understanding what was meant by the word Armistice.
Our founder, Maureen Bianchini Purvis, was that young girl. Her mother was Lillian Mary Bianchini, a proud Canadian veteran of WWII. Never missing a year since the passing of her mother, Maureen has gone to the cemetery site to lay a poppy on Remembrance Day. First alone, then with her husband and finally, as soon as they could walk, her two daughters. They would pause at the cenotaph and look out at all the headstones that lay in the Field of Honour in Beechmount Cemetery in Edmonton. Her two little girls would ask, “Why don’t the others get a poppy?”
maureen bianchini purvis with one of her grandchildren, hudson yates. beechmount cemetery, Edmonton, november 2022.
For years, she provided possible reasons until they grew up and declared, “Mom, I think we should make sure they all get one.” Knowing time was fleeting she decided to try to do that. She started with the help of a few friends, but the number of headstones was overwhelming. She wrote a letter to the Minister of Veterans Affairs, who gave his blessing and encouraged her to begin. Next she contacted the Minister of Education and then she met a young Lieutenant-Colonel who said, “We can do this.”
But Maureen’s goal was not only to honour veterans today. She and her family saw that the key to ongoing remembrance lay in engaging youth in a more meaningful and personal act of remembrance - so that they could truly understand and connect with the sacrifices made to give all of us the peace and freedoms we enjoy today, and carry that connection forward with them through their lives.
No Stone Left Alone was officially launched in 2011 to help ensure an enduring national respect and gratitude for the sacrifice of the Canadian men and women who have lost their lives in the service of peace, at home and abroad. It has become her mission to see that one day all of the soldiers' headstones would have a poppy placed in their honour, with truly No Stone Left Alone.