Rotary Club of Grande Prairie presents Mayor Bill Given and Council with a cheque to fund a new Daytime Homeless Shelter

By Liam Verster

Daytime Homeless Shelter

Rotary Club of Grande Prairie donates $1,000,000 to create Daytime Homeless Shelter

Sep 30, 2019 | 7:53 PM

The Rotary Club of Grande Prairie is funding the creation of a Daytime Homeless Shelter.

A million dollars has been allocated from the organization to secure and renovate a building to house the shelter.

The city will then take over and find organizations to operate the shelter, and Mayor Bill Given says they will be providing essential services.

“The Daytime Outreach Space will be a space that will have staff that work in housing and homelessness, that will help people connect to medical care, that will help people connect to housing outreach workers and other services. And ultimately the goal is not to support people in homelessness, but to help people experiencing homelessness connect with the services that will help them move forward in their journey.”

The shelter will primarily operate during daytime hours but will also be able to provide emergency mats for people to sleep on during extreme weather conditions.

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President of the Rotary Club, Steve Madden, says this issue has been at the forefront of the club’s and the community’s mind, which is why they decided now was the time to fund it.

“With the cold winter months coming on, and, you know Northern Alberta, we’re -30 at any given time in December, January and February. We knew that it was an immediate need because of that, with the folks that are looking for places to stay, because there’s really nothing out there for this kind of initiative, and we knew we needed to do something. This club just said ‘You know what, we need to do something. These are people’s family, these are family members of others, and we need to do something right away.'”

The location of the new shelter has not been decided yet, but both Given and Madden say the goal is to have the Daytime Homeless Shelter open and operational by this winter.