Quesnel is now into the home stretch when it comes to becoming an ‘Age Friendly Community.”
City Council learned this week that it was successful for a couple of 25-thousand dollar grants, including one from the Provincial Government to hire a consultant.
Mayor Bob Simpson…
“So we hire a contractor who goes out and does a performance assessment of all of the services available in our community for seniors, where the gaps are, what the needs are.”
Simpson says Wells just completed this process so they hope to dovetail on that…
“Often what happens is you kind of engage on what the needs are, what the services are, you get a report and then you’re on your own to go out and validate and kind of buy in, so we think that because the Wells report has been done, we can build on top of that and look at having some kind of community forum to validate the report and make it more robust and make sure that we’ve involved more seniors in that process.”
The second grant, from New Horizons, will allow the City to hold a seniors resource fair and put a seniors resource guide together.
Simpson says both of these grant programs also open the door for future funding…
“The age friendly designation, there is an annual amount of about 15 thousand dollars i think you become eligible for, and New Horizons is also an annual program that we can apply to.”
He says it is possible that they can combine these two grants in the future to actually get a resource person to make sure that they are actually serving the seniors and keeping everything alive going forward.