The rumours of its demise are apparently true: the St. Albert Help Society is no more.
The organization has now shut its doors after taking nearly three years to work through the paperwork following its decision to dissolve back in April 2009.According to board member Frank Larkee, it was a slow death by red tape to the tune of more than $100,000 per year.
“It was costing us more in administration fees than we were able to accumulate in terms of revenue,” he began. “Basically, the provincial government was putting so much pressure on us to be able to justify our existence that we ended up having to spend a ton of money on administration instead of on our clients.”
“Every month, Alberta Health Services would provide a new requirement for reporting. Basically, what it was, was a CYA for them: cover your ass. They just kept increasing and increasing and increasing the demands for data and information about the services we were providing.”
Back in the early 1960s, Mary O’Neill and other members of the community figured that new stay-at-home mothers could use extra supports and so the Mothers Day Out program was born. The Help Society evolved from that after the organizers realized that many local seniors needed help with their meals. This brought the Meals on Wheels service (and Wheels to Meals, for a brief period) to St. Albert.
“It was also decided that it would be a really wise idea for us to look at actually providing home care to help people stay in their homes. That was the intent of the organization at the time that it collapsed,” Larkee elaborated.
Home care involved personal care, homemaking and other forms of in-home services to those people who required additional support in order to maintain their independence in their own places of residence. It ended up funding projects that would enable respite care and caregiver relief as well as other aids to its main client base that included seniors, people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, as well as families.
Larkee didn’t have an exact figure on how many people were on its client list at the time but he did recall that there were 18 personal care attendants and two licensed practical nurses on the roster. According to him, it was a great disappointment for everyone involved to have to close the books.
“The government is reaping what they’ve sown. The situation is now that they have these same people that we would have been able to attend to in their homes. There’s still an organization that’s doing it, but it’s now a for-profit organization instead of a not-for-profit organization. It’s not doing the same quality of work, at least in my opinion.”
He ended by commenting that the quality of the services that it provided during its lifetime was beyond reproach, even getting rave reviews from the home care nurses at the Sturgeon Hospital.
The remaining funds have now been moved to the St. Albert Community Foundation. To learn more, call 780-458-8351 or visit www.sacf.ca.
The Meals on Wheels program and Seniors Outreach program now operate out of the St. Albert Senior Citizens’ Club. For more information about those programs or to get in contact with the program co-ordinator, call the seniors’ club at 780-459-0433 or visit www.stalbertseniorsclub.org. The club is located at 7 TachĂ© Street.
