Community Outreach Services is seeking new funding to hire two new outreach workers to provide targeted support to the community’s seniors and foreign workers.
Kathleen Waxer, director of Community and Family Services (CFS), recently submitted two grant proposals—one to Covenant Health and another to Citizen and Immigration Canada—in an effort to secure funds to acquire a seniors outreach worker and settlement outreach worker.
Currently, Jasper has six outreach positions, each responsible for a different life stage, and each offering community programming, resources and confidential, non-judgmental support to those who need it. For instance, there’s a early childhood outreach worker that supports young families as they transition into parenthood and a youth and teen outreach worker that provides support to youth who might be struggling at school or at home.
“The work that we do is connecting people to mountain life and life in Jasper, providing opportunities to connect to each other and providing a connection to support systems,” said Waxer.
Since creating Community Outreach Services 20 years ago, Waxer has kept an eye on the community’s changing demographics to ensure everyone’s needs are being met and has adapted programming and services as needed.
She said she currently feels there are two areas of the community that need some attention: seniors and newcomers.
A seniors outreach worker isn’t a new idea; in 2010, Jasper was part of a two-year provincial pilot project testing the concept, but when the project came to an end in 2012, there was no longer funding to maintain the position, despite extensive lobbying by Waxer and other CFS directors in the province that recognized the value of targeted services for seniors.
“The Government of Alberta provides community supports for most vulnerable populations, but not for seniors,” said Waxer.
“What we’ve proposed in this [grant proposal] is that one of the dangers of being a senior is your connections to community life, connections to your friends and connections to support systems start to become tenuous because you’re more isolated,” she said.
By having a specific seniors outreach worker, Waxer said those connections would be strengthened and the lives of seniors would be enhanced.
Waxer’s other area of concern is the settlement and integration of new Canadians.
“If you think back even 30, 40, 50 years, we’ve had waves of Italian immigrants and Greek immigrants and that’s reflected in the culture of the community, and we’re continuing to evolve with people from the Philippines, people from Jamaica, people from Mexico all settling in Jasper.
“It struck me that we haven’t yet done a good job of connecting some of these people to mountain life and to each other and maybe not to support systems.”
In the grant proposal submitted to Citizen and Immigration Canada, Waxer outlined a few of the supports that Community Outreach Services could provide newcomers to Canada, including one-on-one client support to create a personalized settlement plan or to find housing, services and community supports.
“The other piece is community programming,” said Waxer, noting that could include targeted information on citizenship and immigration, as well as an orientation to life in Canada.
“The other piece to that is we would connect people to the existing community programs. That’s an area I feel really passionate about; we want to have a community where people all feel welcome to attend and participate in community life.”
Community Outreach Services is a collaboration between the municipality’s CFS department and the Jasper Community Team, a registered non-profit society.
The wages and benefits of each of the community’s outreach workers is funded by government grants, which Waxer applies for each year.
“The outreach program is fully funded through outside dollars,” she explained. “The municipality provides the infrastructure, they pay for the rent for the space and the photocopies, but the wages and benefits come 100 per cent from outside sources. That’s been the work of my career is pulling all of these sources of funding together to create something that’s meaningful and available and accessible to the public.”
Nicole Veerman
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