The Grand Centre Lions Club presented the Stepping Stones Crisis Centre with a $25,000 donation last Wednesday. The funds are earmarked for specific projects to teach life skills and improve quality of life for the centre’s future residents and clients.
Specifically, the money will support a community garden space, a pergola over a bench which is being built by Cold Lake Men’s Shed, and community spaces and a children’s activity centre.
“The idea is to allow [residents] the connection with the earth and ground, and to grow and to harvest, and to learn to take care of their own vegetables and whatever else they choose to grow in the beds, said Stepping Stones CEO Melissa Francis. “It also helps to create food stability.”
The new facility will be completed later this summer. It will offer accommodation for women and children fleeing abuse, and will also provide second-stage housing that will encourage women to emerge from harmful abuse cycles.
“Women, when they come to us, are coming to us at the darkest and lowest point in their life,” Francis said.
“Our job as care providers for these people and for taking care of those we serve is to ensure that we not only give them the emergency help they need, but we help them restore a semblance of normalcy—to provide them with skills that will help them make new, better, different choices.”
The organization’s fundraising has shifted from the big sources needed to construct the facility, Francis said. In the past six months Stepping Stones has been focused on those donations where community groups like the Lions can make a major difference.
“We have the house,” Francis said. “We now need to make it a home.”
