Right now, there is a small movement happening in Barrhead and Westlock to restore the Sparrow’s Hope project, a shelter for women fleeing abusive relationships.
The shelter, which opened its doors in 2011, was spearheaded by the Youth for Christ Centre in Westlock.
If you’ve lived in the Westlock area over the past five years, you probably attended a fundraiser for the facility.
The reasons for the demise of Sparrow’s Hope are varied. It would be fair to say the shelter never quite saw the use that its proponents originally envisioned, possibly due to its relative isolation in the County of Barrhead.
Then the facility suffered some flooding damage last spring, rendering part of the building uninhabitable. There were some financial difficulties involving provincial grants. The final blow was the Youth for Christ Centre declaring they could no longer take on running the facility.
At this point, there is no Sparrow’s Hope. There is no building, no organization structured around that facility and no funding. In effect, it’s an entirely new cause.
So should anyone bother? Should Sparrow’s Hope be declared a well-intentioned failure and forgotten?
The thing is, whether or not the shelter was extensively used, doesn’t change the fact that it was used.
We know that relationship abuse is a very widespread problem in Alberta. We know that women fleeing these relationships who live in a rural area may not find it feasible to flee to an urban centre.
There’s definitely a need for a facility like this, but perhaps the original vision of Sparrow’s Hope was too ambitious.
A six-bedroom house open 24/7 just might not be feasible. And perhaps making it a faith-based initiative was not the approach needed for such a project.
We do have to recognize that, however important something like this may be, it’s competing with a lot of other causes needing volunteer manpower and time.
In any case, we hope that the June 23 meeting in Barrhead will not be the last word on this project. It would be a shame to see it die.
