Can a price-tag be put on a family’s safety? If it can, fundraisers say it equals the cost of the whole community’s wellbeing

Emily Murphy Centre executive director Lisa Wilde addresses a crowd of supporters at the Tiny Homes ... Big Impact campaign event at co-chair Martin Ritsma’s barn on Kelly’s Lane. The June 4 celebration brought people from across Ontario to Stratford to raise $600,000 for new tiny homes on the centre’s property.

CONNOR LUCZKA, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Early on in Lisa Wilde’s career at the Emily Murphy Centre, she sat in a playroom in their Barron Street location, watching a young toddler play.

“And she’s going from bin to bin and shelf to shelf, touching things … and I said, ‘Hey, what’s your favourite thing?’ She walked over to the door, and she pointed at the block, and she said – three years old – ‘I'm safe here.’ … She knew, in that room, in that building, she was safe.”

Wilde, now the executive director of the centre, told that story to a packed barn on Kelly’s Lane, as part of the centre’s Tiny Homes … Big Impact fundraising event on June 4. Among other things, Wilde and the campaign co-chairs were asking for the community’s help in giving more families and more children that same feeling of safety.   

The Tiny Homes … Big Impact campaign is a community-driven initiative with the goal of building five new tiny homes on the centre’s existing land: safe, private and supportive housing that will act just as all of the centre’s spaces do, providing counselling, safety planning, life-skills development and connections to community resources that support women as they rebuild confidence and move toward long-term stability.

The campaign responds to a growing need for second stage housing for women who have experienced violence, with or without children, in Stratford and Perth County. As noted by Wilde that evening, the centre’s waitlist has continued to grow since its inception in 1988, reaching a critical point during the COVID-19 pandemic where there were 83 area families looking for a safe refuge.

“Do you know that one in three women in Canada will have experienced some sort of violence in their lifetime?” Wilde asked. “One in four girls by the age of 16 have experienced some form of sexual violence in their lives. … The impacts are far-reaching. They affect physical safety, mental health, housing stability, economic security and overall community well-being. What we do is put that all back together again.

“… These homes will mean stability and safety for at least five more families a year,” Wilde summed up.

The cost for the tiny home project is expected to be $1.2 million. The materials and construction were donated by Blue Branch and NOW Housing, leaving the remaining $600,000 needed from the community to be raised through the campaign led by Wilde and co-chairs Natalie Moore, founder of Moore Creative, and Martin Ritsma, mayor of the City of Stratford.

Another aspect of the campaign is the construction of the homes themselves, as explained by Matt Lubberts, president of NOW Housing.

Through a government grant and their partners, Blue Branch, NOW Housing was able to bring in youth struggling in school and the justice system, giving them training in construction in exchange for high school credits.

“We ended up getting, over the course of two years, 95 kids their high school diplomas,” Lubberts explained. “… We had our guys in the factory direct them, and … they literally did it from start to finish. We're fully CSA approved, so it went through our quality control process, and they were certified from what the students did themselves.

“So what was done with these from the get-go, from the very scratch of these ideas, was a total volunteer or a giving process, and these units were built by people who live in these types of projects, or in these types of subsidized communities, and that's the get-go of this.”