Exciting change for Early Years Family Resource Centre in Swift Current
The new year brings some exciting changes to the Early Years Family Resource Centre in Swift Current at a new location.
The non-profit organization completed the move to the renovated premises just before Christmas.
The various activities offered to families with children aged 0-6 are now provided from this multi-purpose space, located at Hillside Plaza (#6 – 1061 Central Avenue North).
Early Years Family Resource Centre Swift Current Executive Director Laura Beddome is thrilled about the benefits of the new space.
“The new location is going to be absolutely fabulous,” she said. “We’re so excited to be at our new location. It’s actually one of the things that our staff team is most looking forward to is having a space that has the square footage and the setup to house all our programs and services from one location and also hopefully a convenient, accessible and welcoming location for our families for a long, long time.”
The 4,400 square feet space underwent detailed renovations over the past few months to make it suitable for the needs of the Early Years Family Resource Centre. Many local residents will be familiar with this location, because it is the former Central Medical Clinic. More recently it was used by the Saskatchewan Health Authority as a vaccination clinic.
“This is a large space, but it was a whole variety of small rooms that were utilized as part of the medical clinic,” she said. “So we did have rather extensive renovations to undertake in this location. One of the things that we’re so excited about is that this space now has a large wide open play space, which can be transformed into an awesome area for kids and families.”
This large play space will be used for different programs to promote learning through play. There is also a classroom for the pre-school program, a meeting room, a multi-purpose room, a storage room, a kitchen, two washrooms, and office space.
A big advantage of this location is that they were able to make changes to the layout of the space to suit their specific needs as an organization.
“We had the opportunity to think about how we would design and utilize the space for our organization,” she said. “The thought that we were able to put into making it our own is something we’ll really benefit from here at Hillside Plaza. … In addition, this is a location where we can be more visible in the community and where families can find us. There’s ample parking here, which is fantastic, because when parents and kids are coming to visit us, we want the space to be easy to find and easy to come into.” Other benefits of their new location are the amount of storage space and the inclusion of a kitchen facility. Their former rental location did not have everything in one area as part of their own space.
“This location has so much natural light,” she noted. “It’s going to be a bright, sunny, fresh space that we’ve been able to make our own.”
The move to this renovated space was made possible by funding provided through the CanadaSaskatchewan Early Learning and Child Care Agreement between the federal and provincial government.
This funding support for the Early Years Family Resource Centre in Swift Current was announced in March 2022. The Holy Trinity Catholic School Division was designated as the accountable partner for the funding allocation, which includes both start-up funding of $215,000 and ongoing funding.
“That funding was something that they in fact wanted us to put toward having a facility that really worked ideally for us,” Beddome noted.
The funding provided under that agreement meant the Family Resource Centre in Swift Current, which has been providing services in the community for the past 20 years, has transitioned to formally become an Early Years Family Resource Centre.
“One of the awesome things about our new partnership with the Ministry of Education and Holy Trinity Catholic School Division as the accountable
partner was just how closely aligned we were to the model and mandate that the Ministry wanted the Early Years Family Resource Centres in the province to have,” she said. “It’s been a really easy transition as far as our programs and services go. In fact, we were not only meeting all the goals of the Early Years Family Resource Centre model, but we were excelling at them.”
One of the visible changes of this transition is the new name and logo on the large sign outside the entrance to their new location at Hillside Plaza.
“It emphasizes our focus on the early years, which is exactly who we are,” she said. “So right off the cuff it will let people know what we focus on and it also is indicative of our funding partnership with the Ministry and Holy Trinity.”
The Early Years Family Resource Centre in
Swift Current is now one of 15 similar centres in Saskatchewan.
The funding provided through the CanadaSaskatchewan Early Learning and Child Care Agreement will have numerous benefits to the provision of early years services to families in Swift Current.
“The funding has allowed us to expand to offer more of what we were already doing really well and to have more frequency to our programs and services,” she said. “We can offer our drop-in play program Let’s Play more days of the week, we can expand our pre-school programs as needed and expand our programs for parents as needed and just consider doing more and having some additional financial stability.”
The core financial support for services offered by the Swift Current Early Years Family Resource Centre includes funding from the Community Action Program for Children, which is a federal initiative funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada.
She noted the centre provides support to well over 100 families each week through a diversity of programs and services.
“Different programs and services have a different reach, just based on what makes sense for that program,” she said. “Our drop-in play programs reach 40 to 80 families each week and I expect that to grow as we have more days and times when families can come. For our pre-school program Messy Fingers we run four sessions over nine weeks during the school year. It’s an intro pre-school program one-time a week. We reach 30 pre-schoolers each session and we also have a whole variety of families that we reach individually or for unique events that we put on.”
Families can look forward to some expanded hours for the drop-in play program on one evening each week as well as Saturday mornings. Details will be announced on the centre’s Facebook page.
The Swift Current Early Years Family Resource Centre is a non-profit organization and a registered charity. The core funding from the federal and provincial
government provides it with stability, but it also needs to raise additional funds. Beddome therefore noted they will be launching a fundraising campaign to equip their new location, because their goal is to set up different play structures, activity centres and learning resources in the new space.
“Folks are going to see us out in the community inviting people to support us in a variety of ways,” she said. “We are extremely grateful for the stability of the core funding. However there are a whole variety of other things that we will be seeking funding for. So we’ll still be applying for grants, we’ll still be seeking sponsorships for some of the play equipment and activity centres that we will look to acquire in the future. We happily receive and invite donations and financial contributions of all kinds and we’ll still be an organization that needs to do that. However, we’re so grateful to have the security to know that we can grow and we can support everyone really well.”