Epcor to match donations up to $250,000 for Boyle Street's new facility

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Epcor will be matching donations up to $250,000 which will go towards the operating costs of the Boyle Street Community Services’ new building.

At a news conference on Wednesday, both organizations announced the legacy campaign for the new King Thunderbird Centre — okimaw peyesew kamik — which will be dedicated to funding long-term programs, services and building maintenance.

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Jordan Reiniger, executive director of Boyle Street Community Services, said as part of their efforts to put actions behind reconciliation, the new facility has Indigenous culture at the heart of it.

“In our previous building, over 80 per cent of the people who were coming into that space were Indigenous or identified as Indigenous,” Reiniger said.

“We’re going to have cultural and ceremonial spaces indoor and outdoor so that people can access culture and ceremony in the space. Even just the look and feel and the materials that we’re using will be infused with Indigenous culture so that people have that sense of that when they walk in.”

Long-term operational costs

In 2023 the agency secured a development permit to build the new centre in a former paintball venue at 101 Street and 107A Avenue. The building was scheduled to open in 2024, but due to a number of setbacks including issues related to zoning and development permit appeals, it forced them to delay the opening by another year.

The organization had a “very successful” capital campaign and were able to raise the majority of the funds needed to get the building going, Reiniger said. Right now, they are transitioning to an endowment — or legacy campaign — for the operational needs of the building.

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Reiniger said they were able to raise $45 million during the “Build with Boyle Capital Campaign” which saw $24 million come from the community and $21 million from the federal government. He said they did not require any additional contributions from the province but said the province is one of the largest funders of Boyle Street’s ongoing program and services.

New service delivery model and community focus

After the lease for its 105 Avenue centre ended in September 2023 which they’d occupied since 1996, they decided to temporarily spread their services across four different locations in central Edmonton until the new facility is built.

Reiniger said in their previous facility they were serving upwards of 7,000 people a year. He’s anticipating they will be able to help even more people once the new facility opens and will make changes to their service delivery model. The changes they are looking to implement would include a triage emergency service space at the front of the building which will help people access supports quickly and provide spaces that are more community focused.

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“Even though we had to disperse into different sites over the short-term, it allowed us to experiment with that new service delivery model,” Reiniger said.

John Elford, president and CEO of Epcor, said community impact was one of their main reasons for choosing to match donations as a funding model and to create a “lasting legacy” to sustain the new facility.

“You don’t want an agency relying on the ebbs and flows of government grants,” Elford said.

“What we want to do here is establish an endowment that can be there to continually help fund the ongoing sustainment of the facility and the programming inside of that facility so that the community members in need get access to all the support that the Boyle Street team provides.”

–With files from Matthew Black

ctran@postmedia.com

X: @kccindytran

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