Chances are someone in your community has upgraded their skills recently to get a new job, someone has started a trades training program because they found funding that helped cover their expenses, and someone has sought help joining the workforce because English is their second or third language. Chances are also high that someone in your community has found support for trauma to help them prepare to re-enter the workforce, and someone has taken steps to find a path out of poverty.
If you live in the West Kootenays or Boundary area, chances are these people found this support through the Skills Centre in Trail. It’s been a busy year for the Skills Centre with many positive outcomes in the communities it serves.
“Young people, people from equity-seeking groups, women, survivors of trauma, and recent immigrants, all of these people in our communities, took these positive steps towards their training and employment goals. Several of our programs ran at full capacity, and the rest were almost full,” says Morag Carter, executive director of the Skills Centre.
The Skills Centre’s programs helped people in these different walks of life get into trades training, attend boot camps for skills training, access funding to help them upgrade their technology so that they can take the training they need, and work with counsellors and therapists, and in one program, use equine-assisted activities to help survivors of trauma. The Skills Centre also continued to support people living with low income to ensure they had healthy meals and learn to make economical and healthy food choices.
“It may seem like a long list of activities and supports for people in our communities, yet that is exactly what our work and our vision is, fostering inclusive, resilient and prosperous communities. We accomplish this with the many partners we have, from other non-profits to local governments to businesses,” she says.
It’s also been a year of building the Skills Centre’s capacity and adapting to the community’s needs in the second year of the pandemic.
“As an organization, we have a new board chair as of June 16, we brought on a new board member, we developed a new 5 Year Strategic Plan, and we’ve just released our latest Community Impact Report highlighting how we help people in our communities,” Carter adds.
Read a summary of the Skills Centre’s new 5 Year Strategic Plan here.
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