The Barrhead Ripple Connection Support Centre is getting $50,000 from the province that will pay for the salaries of the director and kitchen manager.
Director Darcy Lockhart says her organization is allowed to apply for grants like the Community Initiatives Program (CIP) every three years.
“It will help us keep the doors open a while longer. It is totally for staff wages, my own and our kitchen manager’s wage and it is distributed over a two-year period. $50,000 sounds like a lot of money, but really, it is better than nothing. If we didn’t get it, we wouldn’t be operating,” Lockhart said, adding now that the Barrhead Regional Aquatics Centre is completed she hopes more people will donate to the Ripple Connection and other community-based programs like it.
“Mental health does everything they possibly can but they have so many individuals seeking help and they are so backlogged. At least here, you know, we can try to help take some of the stress off the system. People need help now, not six months from now you know? I’m no therapist and I don’t have any training but what we do here is certainly beneficial to the community,” Lockhart said, adding without the grant funding there is no way the Ripple Connection could stay afloat.
“Volunteers can only do so much. We still have bills to pay. We can only apply for grants like this every three years so, there’s going to be a year in between where we are going to have to figure out how we will keep running,” she said.
“Maybe now that the pool is done, maybe we can focus on some of the human services groups out there. FCSS is in the same boat, even though they get support from the town and the county and can apply for grant monies every year.”
Lockhart said the centre does OK with the little they have.
“It sure would be nice to have some more though. We really want to start a youth program and there’s no place here that takes care of that. You have to go to St. Albert and that’s not right. There’s just no help at all for the young ones. It’s proven mental health issues rear their ugly heads in adolescence,” she said.
During the fiscal year of 2016-17, the Alberta government provided $38 million in Community Facility Enhancement Programs (CFEP) grants to support 464 different community infrastructure projects and $22.2 million was allocated through the province’s CIP program to provide operating and programming funding for community-based initiatives.
