With the house lights dimmed at the Five Points Theatre, Redwood Park Communities played a gritty and gripping podcast about a woman’s descent in human trafficking as the backdrop to launch their capital fundraising campaign, Thursday evening.
Redwood Park Communities wants to raise $3 million to build a family support centre at 151 Lillian Cres., in Barrie’s north end. The facility would allow families in crisis stay together while they get their lives back in order.
Redwood Park Communities executive officer Tim Kent says the last thing he wants to see is families broken apart due to unfortunate circumstances.
“In some ways, it’s not different than maybe a refugee family fleeing a war zone: you get broken apart, you lose each other, you reconnect a couple months later and try to find some place to live,” he said. “It’s very similar, without the bombs falling around you.”
The Lillian Crescent project, which is a partnership with the Salvation Army and the Barrie Bayside Mission, would see a 12-unit family housing and support centre built to offer housing to families in crisis.
“There is so much need in this community,” said the Salvation Army’s Jeff Robertson, who called the Lillian Crescent project “a whole new concept.”
“The hope and passion (to do something like this) has always been there,” Robertson added. “We hope to see moms and dads enjoying that property and getting their lives back together.”
At any given time, Kent said there are between 12 and 15 families without a home in Barrie.
“What used to happen … when a family became homeless, we didn’t have a family shelter of any kind,” he said. “So, the dad would go one way, the mother would go the other way the kids would go into foster care until they were able to get a permanent home.”
Currently, families in crisis can tap into a hotel voucher program.
“It’s better than the street, but it’s not ideal,” Kent said of that program. “It doesn’t allow families to live as a family, properly. And that’s what these units (on Lillian Crescent) will do, by creating that space.”
If all goes according to plan, servicing at the Lillian Crescent site could begin this summer, followed by construction in October, with an opening date targeted for the following fall.
The Lillian Crescent facility is expected to cost around $2.3 million. It will help establish those small things that people take for granted, such as cooking and eating together, said Kent’s wife, Rhonda, who is the organization’s director of housing and family support.
Other money raised during the campaign will go toward other Redwood Park projects.
Redwood Park Communities, a registered charity, is also one of the organizations behind United House transitional housing in downtown Barrie, the conversion of the former Barr’s Motel on Essa Road into 17 units of social housing in partnership with the David Busby Street Centre, as well as working with homeowners to create second suites in an effort to alleviate the city’s housing crisis.
Currently, families in crisis can tap into the hotel voucher program for what was originally designed to be a short period of time, but those stays have grown longer due to the local housing crunch.
“It’s not ideal, so we’re creating a new facility where they can be housed in a normal apartment,” Tim Kent said. “From there, they can have more of a sense of normalcy and get their feet back on the ground.”
While Redwood Park was initially reticent about using people’s stories as part of its fundraising campaign, those same people made them change their minds.
“We’ve been so careful to protect people’s stories, because we never want to use someone’s story to get the word out,” Rhonda Kent said. “That just didn’t seem right.
“But then our families were saying to us, ‘Seriously, we need people to know this is (happening) out there’,” she added.
With Redwood’s continuing involvement in various projects, local awareness has also continued to grow.
“The support in Barrie has been incredible,” Tim Kent said. “It took a little bit of momentum to get going, but now that more and more people are understanding what we’re doing, our reputation is strong.
“People now saying ‘how can we help?’ because they’re seeing the impact that we’re having on families in the community.”
For information, visit www.redwoodparkcommunities.com.
