The Rotary Club of Grande Prairie has allocated $1 million towards a new daytime shelter for homeless people in Grande Prairie.
“The community need was high for this project,” says Rotary Club of Grande Prairie President Steve Madden. “We worked hard to gather up the funds that were available, took it head-on and decided this was something that the entire community needed.”
While City of Grande Prairie bylaws does not permit camping in public spaces, earlier this summer, large groupings of tents, including an emergency fenced-in “tent city” north of Rotary House.
“We saw it as a great opportunity for the initiative and for Rotary to become involved,” Madden adds.
Mayor Bill Given says the city will be the facilitator of the daytime shelter, but from a operations standpoint, it will leave that to various outreach service providers.
“The city will ultimately be the owner of the space, and we will be going to specialist agencies to do the operations on an ongoing basis. The Rotary Club is the key to it all because we wouldn’t be able to establish space for this kind of programming without their support.”
Given adds the additional shelter is a reaction to what was witnessed over the summer when the Saint Lawrence Centre, which had been operating for several years, had to close down.
“I think the community saw how integral that use was to the overall continuum of housing in Grande Prairie when that daytime space wasn’t available, housing issues and homelessness was much more visible in our community and we had a harder time connecting with people.”
However, it is not known at this time whether or not officials with the Saint Lawrence Centre will be directly involved with this project, or will be in addition to it.
“At this stage, we don’t have any intention that this will be a space for Saint Lawrence Centre, but we will certainly lean on their experience in understanding how we should program the space and what sort of operations there should be,” Given says.
A physical location has not yet been decided on. Officials hope to have doors open before winter begins.