L'Arche Stratford will be hosting the 9th annual Walk N' Roll fundraising event next month.
L'Arche is an organization that helps adults with intellectual disabilities and the assistants who live, work and learn with them.
The walk around the Upper Queen’s Park in Stratford will raise more money toward the Be, Belong, Become campaign, and Christopher Cantlon, the events fundraising committee chair, says the campaign aims to do something very special in Stratford.
"So it's to build a new facility to help make L'Arche Stratford a more focused community. It's going to be 15,000 square feet, there will be offices and activity rooms, as well as 8 live-in suites, which is really exciting," Cantlon shared.
Cantlon adds the initial ideas for the Be, Belong, Become campaign first arose in 2017, and they've been working on getting the new facility built ever since.
With that in mind, Cantlon says that getting the new facility built will be a major game changer for L'Arche and the people they help.
"This'll be huge because it will help us to deal with some of the huge numbers of requests for people needing assistance in living, but not critical healthcare assistance," said Cantlon. "It will make a big difference and it will increase our capacity percentage quite significantly and it will help the community be able to access these sorts of facilities. This will give a much greater sort of community focus centre, sort of a hub, if you will."
You can register now for the Walk N' Roll event on October 19 as a team or individual. You can also donate to the Be, Belong, Become campaign online.
The project has a price tag of roughly $6.5 million dollars, and Cantlon says they're about 60 percent of the way there. You can register through links available on Canada Helps here: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/larche-stratford/p2p/walknroll-2024/.
You can also do so via the L'Arche Stratford website here: https://www.larchestratford.ca/index.php?page=Events&&page_id=33&&id=33.