Arrowhead Clubhouse is a safe, supportive place for adults with mental illness to gather weekdays in Sechelt – however, donations are needed to keep the space open from Monday to Friday.
Currently Arrowhead has enough funds to make it to August, but if $15,000 more isn’t found by then, the clubhouse will have to close during one weekday.
Arrowhead member Christie Peters, who suffers from personality disorder, said closing the clubhouse one day a week would be devastating to the roughly 120 members that use it.
She said many of the members are homeless and have nowhere else to go during the day.
“If it was closed then those people would be hanging out in the library or the mall or McDonald’s and some of our members have been kicked out of those places,” she said.
“There is nowhere else to meet that is a safe, bully-free, stigma-free zone.”
The clubhouse also offers meals to members for $1 a day, which is the only way many on fixed incomes can feed themselves, Peters said.
“I wouldn’t be able to feed myself or my daughter without the one meal a day, so that’s huge,” she said.
Peters also noted the support offered at Arrowhead is invaluable and not having access to that support one day a week would seriously impact the health and well-being of members.
“I personally wouldn’t have got better if I didn’t have Arrowhead because I have gone through lots of med changes and all kinds of things,” she said, adding staff at the clubhouse helped her get her daughter Suzy back after Suzy was sent off-Coast for care.
“They helped me with my parenting and when I tried to get her back they helped me… Arrowhead staff helped with all of it.”
Peters said the value of the clubhouse is obvious to its users but it’s been a struggle to get the full funding it needs to be open five days a week and having to go to the community yearly to ask for funding assistance is upsetting to members.
“It’s frustrating because the members are always afraid that they’re going to lose that day and it creates a lot of anxiety around here,” she noted.
“People are afraid. They’re afraid of not having their lunch and they don’t necessarily have a skill level to understand why we might lose a day. “
Arrowhead Clubhouse secures about $200,000 in funding from BC Housing, BC Gaming and local governments and organizations each year to operate four days a week. Members, however, want to have the safe space available every weekday, so about five years ago the clubhouse started raising money in the community to stay open for a fifth day, at a cost of about $50,000 more a year.
The clubhouse was able to put $25,000 toward the extra day this year and recently the Lions Club and the Sechelt Hospital Auxiliary stepped up with donations of $5,000 each, leaving just $15,000 to raise in order to keep the clubhouse open five days a week until the end of 2017.
Chair of the Arrowhead fundraising committee, Brian Smith, is hopeful the community will come through once again for Arrowhead, as there doesn’t appear to be any more funding available from the province, the feds or Vancouver Coastal Health.
Regardless of where this year’s $15,000 shortfall comes from, Smith knows members need to have the space available, which is why he’s turning to community groups and the wider public for help.
“We are organizing an early campaign this time to our usual community donors and of course we would encourage anyone who’s reading the article to contact us through our website and they can donate online if they wish to do that,” Smith said.
Find out more at www.arrowhead-clubhouse.org.
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