Budgets typically tight at the best of times, non-profit groups such as Community Care Concepts are facing extra strains during the coronavirus pandemic. Providing them some extra support is precisely the rationale of the Resilient Communities Fund, a newly launched $83-million revenue stream of the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
Woolwich-based Community Care Concepts is to receive $120,000 from the fund to help the agency continue its work.
CCC is one of 486 organizations across the province benefitting from about $41 million in the first round of funding.
Announcing the grant last week, Kitchener-Conestoga MPP Mike Harris boasted about the work the organization has done throughout the pandemic, while maintaining the need to support them as we continue to move forward.
“We’re continuing to focus on ways that we can help our non-profits and our community organizations, move through COVID-19, try and be flexible with what’s going on. A lot of them have had to revamp the way they do things, and the government will be here as a willing partner to help them do that,” said Harris. “Given the complexities of COVID and obviously with it hanging around a little bit longer than we’d all like I’m sure, we’re definitely going to have to look at ways that we can support these kinds of community organizations that are so vital to our communities, especially with Community Care Concepts being very focused on seniors. The seniors’ groups are a little bit more disproportionally affected by COVID-19, so we need to make sure we’re looking after them.”
Harris says applications for the first round of funding opened in August 2020 and recipients were chosen in the last few months.
Cathy Harrington, executive director of CCC, welcomed the grant, saying she was grateful to receive the funding support while also highlighting the issues they have faced since the start of the pandemic.
“As an essential non-profit service that supports seniors and adults with unique needs to live independently in their own homes, Community Care Concepts of Woolwich, Wellesley and Wilmot has continued to provide direct in-person services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This period has challenged the organization’s ability to respond to increasing demand, increasing complexity and diversity of needs, reduced staffing and volunteer capacity, the need for program redesign, new infection prevention and control practices and a reduction in both client and fundraising revenue,” said Harrington in a release.
“This funding will be a tremendous support in helping our organization to build capacity and resiliency to meet new and emerging needs in the aftermath of the pandemic. We are thankful for the support provided which will allow us to research and implement innovative service-delivery models, develop a staff and volunteer recruitment strategy, adapt infection prevention and control practices to community-based settings and develop a fund development strategy that will sustain us well into the future.”
The Resilient Communities Fund provides grants up to $150,000 to non-profit organizations for needs such as mental and physical health and wellbeing supports for staff or volunteers, identifying new health and safety processes, or purchasing new technology and personal protective equipment. Capital needs such as renovations and facility updates are also supported.
Harris says the government will be looking into providing more grants through the Resilient Communities Fund within the next year.
