Westman projects up for economic awards

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This article was published 31/08/2022 (1130 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Three Westman-based projects are in the running for awards that recognize economic contributions to Manitoba.

The annual Provincial Awards for Excellence in Economic Development celebrate Manitoba-based economic development projects in four categories: the rising star award, project of the year under $100,000, project of the year over $100,000 and award of distinction.

Two of the six nominees in the under-$100,000 category are from Westman.

Erickson-based SCORE Store Inc., a thrift shop serving its home community as well as Sandy Lake, Clear Lake, Onanole and Rolling River First Nation, first opened its doors approximately two years ago, according to founder and president Steve Langston.

When the store opened, Langston said, the daycare in Erickson hadn’t received its annual provincial funding yet and while brainstorming possible ways to raise funds, he and his wife decided to open the store as a community-focused social enterprise rather than pursue more traditional fundraisers.

“We were trying to find sustainable ways to raise funds for that non-profit and other non-profits and we came upon the idea of a thrift shop,” he said.

They leased the site of a former pharmacy that had been dormant for five years, and have been collecting and selling donated items since the summer of 2020.

Beyond helping locals find more affordable household items and raising funds for local groups, Langston said the SCORE Store is also supporting tourism.

“Whether [customers are] travelling from their small community or from Clear Lake as tourists, thrifting is a pretty popular thing to do,” he said. “To offer them that unique shopping experience is something that the market is really enjoying.”

To date, Langston estimates that the store has raised about $25,000. The strategy for the collected money has been to donate 50 per cent to non-profits and make the other half available as grants for community projects.

Those projects have included a donation to the Southquill Health Area Food Bank and assisting a group of locals in receiving funding to create a site plan for the building of a pier on Needle Lake.

Also nominated in the project of the year under $100,000 category was the RM of Wallace-Woodworth for its “Wallace-Woodworth Wants to Know” initiative.

Seven communities — Elkhorn, Kenton, Harding, Lenore, Kirkella, Kola and Hargrave — amalgamated into Wallace-Woodworth in 2015, which the RM’s economic development officer, Tiffany Cameron, said had a major impact on local residents. This is why Wallace-Woodworth launched the project, to assess what developments residents are looking for.

“That really fundamentally changed municipalities in Manitoba,” Cameron said. “One of the things that was lost was the connection between council and community economic development.”

Post-amalgamation, there were no economic development corporations or economic development boards left in the RM, Cameron said. Groups were left to their own devices and could come to council for funding, but there was no active working relationship.

This meant that, for example, when the province made sustainable community grants available, the RM didn’t know which projects were being worked on or needed funding.

To solve that problem, the Wants to Know project set out in fall 2020 to perform community engagement in Kola, Reston and Elkhorn. Because it started during the COVID-19 pandemic, the early stages involved a lot of online work and Zoom meetings.

After getting that feedback, Cameron used it as the basis for workshops in those communities and asked participants: what do we want to preserve, what are the values that are important to us that we can’t lose, and what do we want to create?

To that second question, residents largely expressed that they didn’t want their communities to lose their small-town, close-knit feeling.

Community action reports summarizing all the findings have been compiled, and now steering committees in Kenton and Elkhorn are working on implementing the suggestions in concert with the municipal council. A council is still being formed in Kola.

Cameron said other municipalities in Manitoba could benefit from a similar approach and hopes that winning an award could help bring the work by the communities in Wallace-Woodworth into prominence.

The region’s final nominee, this time in the over-$100,000 category, is the Lots-A-Tots expansion project in Russell that was completed last year.

The project, according to daycare director Heather Betke, more than doubled the daycare’s number of spaces by adding a second building in another part of the community, allowing Lots-A-Tots to add more preschool and infant spots for the first time since the centre was founded.

“We only ever had eight infant [spaces] for the last 32 years, and we always had a wait list,” Betke said. “Now we have 16 spaces, so that’s wonderful. Our existing centre has 58 spaces, but with the two buildings, now we have 118.”

She said it was a good thing the contract for the work was signed before the pandemic started or else it might not have gotten off the ground with the price of building materials on the rise.

Though the expansion required fundraising in the first place, Betke said the centre is still looking for donations to help repay a loan provided by the municipality to complete the project.

With a potential win at next month’s award gala, Betke hopes that might bring out some more donors.

The gala is set for Sept. 22 in Winnipeg. Langston and Cameron both expressed interest in attending in person, while Betke said she’s looking for a member of the centre’s board of directors to attend for her due to a scheduling conflict.

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