Raising awareness and hope

Shannon LeClair

Times Reporter

 

Project Hope has been in Strathmore for approximately 15 years and November is their awareness month. 

Two of the founding members of Project Hope had children with special needs and they felt there was a need for more focused programs for kids with special needs at the schools. It began in Westmount Elementary with about five kids 15 years ago. The project was such a success it has continued to grow over the years and different types of therapy were added to enhance the project for the kids. 

“It’s going well. It’s been a really worthwhile project and the kids really benefit from it and they enjoy it too,” said Corinne Ball, a member of the board.  

Project Hope is a group of people who fundraise in the community to provide art therapy, music therapy and physical education therapy to students with special needs in the schools. The project is completely community funded, and while it runs in conjunction with the school, the school system doesn’t provide funding.  

“It’s any student that could benefit from therapy that will help them with their social or cognitive skills or emotional issues, so they have a wide variety of special needs. All the kids are different. It’s neat because then the programs are tailored to each kid as well,” said Ball. 

Sometimes if a child has been assessed and it’s determined the child would benefit from one of the therapy programs then they will have an opportunity to take part, though generally it is students from kindergarten to Grade 12. There are approximately 50 to 60 kids a year involved with the project. 

Members try to do more promotion in November because it is a new school year and there are new ideas coming in and they want to raise as much awareness as they can during the month. This year there will be art auctions with the artwork being displayed at various businesses around town. 

“It’s a piece of art that is done by one of the Project Hope art therapy students, so its one of the students themselves that’s actually in the project that paints or does whatever the art is and then donates it to us to auction off,” said Ball. 

The pieces are really special because they are one of kind pieces done by the kids. They have auctioned off the art in the past at gala auction, so they decided to try doing it during awareness month through local businesses.

Project Hope will still be doing dinner and an auction at the Gala but instead of auction items they are going to get experience auctions. Experience Hope theme. They plan to auction off things like hot air balloon rides, or Luge rides at Canada Olympic Park. It’s not determined what exactly they plan to bring in, or who the guest speaker will be but the board has a number of interesting ideas for this year’s gala.