Artist drawing of Rising Above's planned new building. It would be added at the site of the current location in the Young Offenders Centre.

By Curtis Galbraith

Community

Rising Above launching a new fundraiser this weekend

Oct 17, 2023 | 5:40 PM

Someone will spend most of the weekend 150 feet above the ground in the basket of a crane this weekend.

Rising Above will launch its capital campaign called Rising Higher on Friday.

Executive director Mel Siggelkow explains how this will work.

“Friday, 9 o’clock (in the morning) in the Staples parking lot, Dan Rigler, one of our board members, will be going up in a crane 150-200 feet, something like that, in the air.”

“He’s going to be up there from Friday (at) about 9 o’clock until Sunday afternoon about 4 o’clock. Obviously, he’ll have to come down (at times) because there’s no washroom in there, he’ll have to come down for short breaks in between.”

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Siggelkow says Rigler will stay up there overnight unless it is too windy.

“He’ll be in this little basket which is not much larger than a space for a chair with walls built around you. That’s where he’ll be spending the weekend.”

This is all part of a fundraiser for a new, $5 million building Rising Above wants to add near its current location in the old Young Offenders Centre.

Siggelkow says they are asking the city, County of Grande Prairie, and MD of Greenview to put a combined $1 million towards the project.

“We’re going to try to get about ($1.5 million) from the province and if we got another ($1 million) from here (the three municipalities), our own contribution from our donor base is currently about $1 million plus we’ve had business support express interest.”

The new building would add programming space and bed capacity plus bring all the women’s residences onto the site.