President & Executive
Director's Report
President of the Board, Greg Allen, and Executive Director, Jennifer Gray-GrantShiny clean floors and spotless facilities have never been a sadder sight.
After Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH) closed in mid-March, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, our custodial staff used the sudden closure to do a deep clean including floor waxing and polishing, parkade painting and complete window cleaning. That left our facilities looking clean and shiny but, sadly, empty.
Over the past year CNH was filled with the sound of children’s laughter, greetings in multiple languages, a bustle in our lobbies, lively music from exercise classes, people chatting in our kitchens as they cooked delicious meals and youth playing energetic sports in our gyms.
All that ended when we closed down because of COVID-19.
But for most of the fiscal year, from April 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020 we enjoyed many highlights and ongoing great activities.
We opened RISE Community Health Centre, thanks to Ministry of Health funding, bringing healthcare to our neighbours who experience barriers to getting appropriate health care.
We started providing seniors health programming at some local seniors’ housing sites. Seniors helped CNH to select a new bus for the Seniors Shuttle, funded by the Ministry of Health. And we kicked off a Rainbow Roundtable Collingwood for LGBTQ2S+ seniors.
We signed a new federal contract for our services to newcomers and continued our work around the $10aDay prototype for child care. We continued to settle into the Annex offering preschool, arts, culture and recreation programming, gatherings such as the Annual Artisan Market and a popular dance pilot where dance groups could access the Annex at no or low fees.
Family Place and Youth Centre worked on managing growing numbers of participants and delicious smells wafted from our Annex kitchen as staff prepared daily hot lunches for our child care programs. Staff hosted a magical Summer Solstice event in our Food Forest and C.R.E.W. youth participated in the annual Pulling Together Journey which took place on Tla’amin Territory (Powell River).
All of this was made possible by our operations staff who greeted participants, cleaned our facilities, tracked our funds, paid staff, organized volunteers and populated our social media.
We never anticipated the fiscal year would end with us temporarily shutting the doors and many CNH staff suddenly working from home. But staff responded with such professionalism, quickly revising programming to offer online versions of everything from English classes and homework help to Zumba and youth groups. Seniors and Community Development staff teams worked extraordinarily hard to configure new programs to distribute food hampers to local seniors and families. Staff recruited and trained over 100 volunteers to help to distribute food and call seniors for friendly chats or do their weekly shopping. Although our childcare programs had to close for about 2.5 months, staff worked hard to create new procedures to ensure children and staff would be safe. CNH staff also created an overall CNH Safety Plan, with additional safety measures for every program. And our Board of Directors became familiar with more meetings, additional work overseeing CNH’s COVID response and got to peek at the inside of their fellow directors’ homes via Zoom.
When we look at what CNH staff and Board Directors did during the year, and how professionally they responded to the COVID-19 emergency, we feel so proud and appreciative of all that they have accomplished. In person or virtually we are all CNH, giving our neighbourhood a place to belong, a place to grow.
Greg Allen, President of the Board
Jennifer Gray-Grant, Executive Director