CENTRE WELLINGTON – The Centre Wellington Community Foundation (CWCF) has created a rapid response fund that pools donations to help vulnerable people in the community.
According to a press release, the CW COVID-19 Community Response Fund was created with $10,000 in contributions from CWCF and local donors.
“Responding to the urgent need to keep the most vulnerable in our community safe and healthy, we established this fund to enable rapid response granting to support the work of our front-line organizations,” said Randall Howard, CWCF chair in a press release.
CWCF is a public, charitable foundation that helps local non-profit organizations find resources to support their work through grants.
They have announced the first grant from the fund will be supplying video-conferencing software licenses, which were subsidized by callbridge.com, to affected local charities.
“We bought a bunch of licenses from Callbridge because one of the problems is people can’t get together,” said Raymond Soucy, CWCF executive director. “This helps those organizations to continue to operate.”
Soucy said they have been speaking with local charities to understand what the short-term and long-term impacts of the pandemic are.
“There’s a bunch of themes we’re hearing access to food is a problem, support for seniors in isolation, transportation is an issue, mental health and of course computers for the kids at school,” Soucy said.
Soucy further said local charities are still pressing on despite their physical locations being shut down.
“We have come across many truly wonderful organizations and people in our community that are working flat out to help their clients deal with the hardships caused by our current situation,” Soucy said.
In a press release said he was pleased with the response from the community before any announcement was even made.
“Even before we could officially announce the fund, donations have already started coming in which shows the type of caring community we live in,” Soucy said and noted in a follow-up phone call that many of these were anonymous donations.
Anyone who wishes to support the CW COVID-19 Community Response Fund with an immediate tax-deductible donation can do so at https://www.canadahelps.org/en/dn/5305#7
