Centre 105 hosted a celebration on April 12, thanking the Ontario Trillium Foundation for a $106,000 capital grant, which has paid for the construction of two accessible washrooms and a shower facility at the drop-in Centre located at Trinity Anglican Church in Cornwall, Ont.
“This project will help improve the health, hygiene, self-esteem of the increasing number of vulnerable citizens in our city of Cornwall,” said Taylor Seguin, the executive director of Centre 105, an Anglican Community Ministry that provides a hot breakfast three days a week, a variety of other supports and a sense of community for hundreds of people who visit it every week.
Justin Towndale, mayor of Cornwall, and MPP Nolan Quinn attended the celebration and offered their congratulations. “Centre 105 is doing such amazing work for our community here and to be able to have the shower, I think that really makes a big difference for the lives of everyone that uses the services here at Centre 105,” Quinn said, adding that it will be a great complement to the washer and dryer that the centre already has and that the accessible washrooms are an extremely important addition.
The Rev. Canon Peter John Hobbs, director general of the Anglican Community Ministries, thanked the Ontario Trillium Foundation and the elected officials for their support. “I really want to thank the parish of Trinity Church, Father Adam Brown, and the support and the collaboration that Centre 105 has enjoyed with the parish, and we look forward to that relationship just continuing to deepen.” He also thanked all the staff and volunteers at Centre 105 “who each day, day in and day out, make it all happen.”
Hobbs brought greetings and congratulations from Bishop Shane Parker of the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa, who wasn’t available to attend the event.
Seguin gave a special shout out to shout out to Matthew Daigle and Shawn Kyer and the whole Millennial Contracting team. “We just want to thank them for their dedication to this project. They’ve been so awesome to work with.”
Eric Charlebois of Millennial was working on finishing the shower room on the day of the celebration. He told Perspective that working on this project meant a lot to him because only a few years ago he went through a very hard time, became homeless and stayed at The Mission in Ottawa. During the pandemic when restaurants were closed, it was sometimes difficult to find a public washroom.
He talked about the importance of kindness people showed and how much it meant when he took shelter from a rainstorm in the entry of a store and a woman who also stepped in to escape the rain took the time to listen and talk with him. She gave him some money for coffee and food, which was wonderful, he recalled, but “that conversation, to have a stranger listen and to get empathy from the other person, that stuff is life-changing.”
That’s what he sees happening at Centre 105. “There might be 100 people here, but if there’s one person in there who leaves thinking ‘That meal, that conversation I had with whoever, that made me last till tomorrow,” all their efforts have paid off. “At the end of the day, it’s kindness, right?,” he said, “to give them a shower, to give them a cot for five hours to sleep on, rather than the ground.”
Working on this project, “makes me feel so good,” Charlebois said. “To be able to help another person, because someone’s going to walk in one day here, and they’re going to take a shower in the shower that I built, and they’re going to sit there and look at themselves in the mirror and think, I feel so much better.” He thanked Millennial for hiring him and giving him a fresh start.
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Qu’est-ce que le bonheur?