I Need a Hero – October 31, 2008

As some of you know we, the Friendship House of Prince Rupert are celebrating fifty years of offering our services to our community. I have been there for twenty years, that’s a long time. It is our hope to have a celebration very soon along with that an open house involving all three of our locations.
We are now offering our Aama Goot Aboriginal Women’s Wellness Program; we have brought in a talented young lady with a great attitude and a solid work ethic, Alison Smith. She will be offering a number of programs and services with the medicine wheel in mind as well setting up a resource center. One of our long standing activities within this program is the “Power Puff Girls” this will be starting this Monday. This is a girls group for those between the ages of 8-13 years. This program will run every Monday from 3:15 to 5pm, this is a drop in program but it would be nice if you could phone and RSVP it’ll give us a nice idea as to how many children to expect. Alison will also be offering a “Women’s Activities Group” where they will do a variety of programs and activities, if there is enough interest I would like to bring back the native art and carving program. If you have any program ideas that Alison can work on give her a call.
We recently brought in a fine young Canadian kid to implement our “Men’s Aboriginal Family Support Worker Program”. This program will be offering support to men with a focus on education, prevention and healthy socialization activities. Lyle Angus will be working full time out the “Da House” and will be offering some programs in the near future. If you have any questions or have any ideas you would like to see in this program give Lyle a call.
With both of these programs the staff will generally be working a Monday to Friday 9-5 shift but once we get an idea of what times are best for the participants I anticipate those hours changing to include some evening and weekend work. Our phone number at Da House is 250-627-1717 Lyle can be reached at ext. 63 and Alison can be reached at ext. 24
Another bright light at “Da House” is the success we are experiencing in offering our “Family Advocate/Community Resource Worker”. As some of you know we have Ulf Kristansen working with us in this position. Ulf basically will help you with application forms, do a little bit advocacy and point you in the right direction. He will not be holding your hand or doing your resume for you, we have services in town that can do that. One night a week Ulf will also be at our Youth Center where he will chat it up with the youth and see how he can help the 30 to 40 youth who go there each night.
Our Aboriginal Family Literacy Program is off to a flying start, our Coordinator is Andrea Weinmeyer and is the final stages of setting up our Literacy Room. The Literacy room will be open to everyone as we encourage families to come on down and see some of our wonderful resources. We will be offering tradtional story telling one night a week and beleive this is going to be awesome.
It’s not rocket science on how we set up and offer our programs basically for each program we offer at the Friendship House, it involves three components. An activity; this brings in the participants gets there interest; the activity could vary from making fry bread or making a dream catcher. Then there are the healthy snacks, food mmmm. We leave the food out and the participants can help themselves. Then lastly somewhere in our time together we have a lesson or a guest speaker, this can focus on anything, after a few sessions we are able to find out what the people want to learn or talk about. Then we go about and bring in relevent guest speakers. The other focus of course is the medicine wheel. I’ll let you think about that.
Friendship House has an open door policy many of these programs are available to you. If you have any questions or any ideas you want to add give me a call at Da House (I’m here all week ladies and gentleman) or email me at ineedahero.pr@gmail.com Peace and have an awesome week.