Men’s Resource Centre stages wellness walk
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/08/2021 (1903 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Members of the Men’s Resource Centre of Brandon held their first big public event in 18 months on Tuesday morning by organizing a wellness walk and donation drive in the city’s downtown core.
Around a dozen people ended up taking part in the walking portion of this event, which involved traversing a roughly two-kilometre loop that began and ended at Princess Park.
Outside of Men’s Resource Centre representatives, the travelling crowd was composed of other local groups that offer similar services, including the Brandon Neighbourhood Renewal Corporation, the Sexuality Education Resource Centre and the Ohitika/Ogichidaa Warrior Men’s Program.
After the walk concluded, facilitator Valerie Sandy told the Sun she was happy for this opportunity to publicly raise awareness for the Men’s Resource Centre, since this service is still relatively new in the community and hasn’t been able to spread its wings throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There are services for our women, which is awesome! There are services for our youth, which is great! But what about our men?” she said. “They are suffering on the streets and a lot of them have intergenerational trauma, residential school trauma and addictions.”
The John Howard Society of Brandon first opened its Men’s Resource Centre in January 2020, and held a grand opening the following month, with the aim of providing a space for vulnerable men looking to obtain various support services.
At the time, John Howard executive director Ross Robinson said that he wanted to use this space to help newly released prisoners from the Brandon Correctional Centre successfully reintegrate into society.
“We understand that all the staff at BCC do a great job to prepare people for their release. Release is a process, it’s not an event. Once you get released, then what? That’s where we take over,” he said in February 2020.
With the emergence of the pandemic in March 2020, Robinson explained on Tuesday that the centre had to close its doors to the public, with staff being forced to find innovative ways to maintain contact with their clients.
“We had some very simple things like a chalkboard where people could leave messages, and we could connect with them that way because a lot of our people don’t have phones or anything like that,” he said.
Over the last month or so, a significant relaxing of COVID-19 restrictions meant that the Men’s Resource Centre was able to reopen its doors and allow multiple clients in at once.
Not only does this allow certain services to start up again, but the easing of health restrictions also gives centre representatives more freedom to reach out and begin collaborating with other like-minded groups for events like Tuesday’s wellness walk.
Ohitika/Ogichidaa regional co-ordinator Jason Gobeil told the Sun that he just started collaborating with the Men’s Resource Centre this summer, and is already finding a lot to like.
“What we do with our men in our programming is a lot of land-based learning and activities, but this essentially talks about men’s wellness as a whole and that’s something we need to unite on as a front and this beautiful collaboration we see here today is exactly that,” Gobeil said.
SERC program co-ordinator Kerri Judd said that her group has also been closely working alongside the Men’s Resource Centre, since this new service provides them with a broader platform to distribute resources and organize workshops on sexual health.
Judd just hopes that this mutually beneficial collaboration can continue into the fall, with the fourth wave of the pandemic looming on the horizon.
“We’ve been doing community outreach and trying to get out a bit more while we can because we just don’t know what the future holds with COVID,” she said.
To find out more information about the Men’s Resource Centre of Brandon and its various services, visit brandonjohnhoward.ca/mens-resource-centre.
» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com
» Twitter: @KyleDarbyson