Stratford’s Optimism Place women’s shelter celebrated the beginning of construction on a 7,000 square-foot, 18-bed expansion to its shelter building with an official ground-breaking ceremony Thursday evening.
The Optimism Place women’s shelter and its partners are “Building on Hope” as they officially broke ground Thursday evening on a planned 650-square-metre( 7,000 square-foot), 18-bed expansion to its current shelter building.
The ground-breaking ceremony came at the end of a celebration that included funding announcements and the public launch of its Building on Hope campaign to raise the final $1 million needed to reach the shelter’s $5-million campaign goal.
“We’ve called this project ‘Building on Hope,’ expanding supports for women and children in Perth County where we envision a day when every Perth County woman and their child (who are) seeking safety will be able to receive the residential and community based supports they need to heal from their trauma and build a future of hope and optimism,” Optimism Place executive director Jasmine Clark said during Thursday’s celebration. “We consider this expansion the first step of many we plan to take in addressing the need for additional emergency beds and transitional housing in our community.”
Contributors to the project include the City of Stratford, which last month committed to covering more than $82,000 in building permit and other fees; Marklevitz Architects Inc., the project architects who contributed the equivalent of $94,000 in services; and the Province of Ontario and the Ontario Trillium Foundation, which granted Optimism Place $100,000 through the Resilient Communities Fund to support additional staffing costs, programming and the development of an Optimism Place social enterprise initiative.
Optimism Place also received $3.4 million last year from the federal government’s $250-million Women and Children Shelter and Transitional Housing Initiative. Administered by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the funding includes support for the construction of the expansion, as well as six years of operational support for Optimism Place.
“I’m so pleased that the federal government was able to support (this project) through the National Housing Strategy and through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation because it’s so important that there is that partnership among the different levels of government, among the private sector, among the volunteer not-for-profit sector,” Perth-Wellington MP John Nater said Thursday. “Those types of partnerships are so important going forward to ensure we’re all working toward the same goal and the same vision.”
Less than a year from Optimism Place’s 40th anniversary, Building on Hope campaign chair Kathy Vassilakos also spoke Thursday about the importance of continued community support to ensure the women’s shelter can continue serving women and children in need in Stratford and across the wider Perth County for years to come.
“Optimism Place is where abstract meets reality and where change is possible. The work that they do takes the statistics that we see and it gives hope to the women and children they support and, by extension, they give hope to our entire community,” Vassilakos said. “In the next few months to a year … Optimism Place will need to raise $1 million to make sure that the building we see (in the architectural drawings) is ready to support women and children, and also ready to support the amazing front-line workers who provide services both here and across our community.”
The capital campaign, Vassilakos added, will include fundraisers, door knocking and a monthly matching-donor program that will maximize donations from individuals, couples, families and social groups.
“This community is really known for generosity. I really don’t see any part of this capital campaign as a challenge for our community. I prefer to call it an invitation and a call to action,” she said. “We are inviting our community to join us in doing more than just building bricks and mortar because this campaign really is about building on hope.”
The Optimism Place expansion is expected to open in the fall of 2023.