Connect with us

Community

SPARC Kindness Rock Garden promotes love, happiness and kindness in the heart of Red Deer

Published

3 minute read

SPARC RED DEER KINDNESS ROCKS PROJECT

SPARC Red Deer, is pleased to announce a new “Paint the Town Positive” activity designed to promote positive messaging by creating a kindness rock garden.  We have partnered with Capstone to start the rock garden beside the Riverwalk in Capstone, adjacent to the fountain in Canada 150 Square, at the end of Alexander Way. We encourage Red Deerians to participate by adding their own colourful positive rocks. The purpose is to spread kindness and encourage further involvement by our community.  We’d love to see families come together to paint rocks and then, while out for a walk or bike ride, add their kindness rocks to the site.  We encourage parents to promote these positive behaviours in their children, which in turn, helps their kids grow up great!

Capstone – Red Deer’s only multi-family, riverside community – is excited to partner with SPARC Red Deer on the Kindness Rocks project! Capstone is a vibrant, healthy, inclusive neighbourhood that’s connected to new ideas, explores fresh ways of living, and is designed for life in Red Deer today and in the future.  The Kindness Rocks garden is just one of many elements in Capstone that favours human connection, and creates a balance between living, working, and culture & recreation.

Help us grow this rock garden to see how big and positive it can get!  Come back to visit and add more rocks throughout the summer.

What is Paint the Town Positive? It is youth-driven chapter of SPARC Red Deer. The idea is for youth to give back and spread kindness in the community through various projects and initiatives that are designed and created by them. This is to engage youth in positive activities and also to allow our community to see youth in positive ways which builds assets! Youth can also use their involvement to build up their volunteer experience for future resumes. Previous activities include youth donating and distributing warm winter wear in our City Hall Park, designing kindness rocks that were distributed within the community, and leaving bookmarks with positive messages throughout the community.

SPARC Red Deer hopes to brighten our community through this simple gesture of kindness! For more information, visit sparcreddeer.ca and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

SPARC Red Deer is a local non-profit coalition designed to promote and educate community members and families about the ’40 Developmental Assets”. The 40 Developmental Assets, developed by the Search Institute, are research-proven life experiences or building blocks which all children need to grow up healthy, caring, and responsible. Research shows that the higher number of these assets a young person has, the more likely they are to thrive and to engage in positive behaviours, and avoid risky behaviours.

To learn more about SPARC, visit sparcreddeer.ca, or contact Rania Page, SPARC co-chair at 403.896.9431 or [email protected].

SPARC Red Deer is a local non-profit coalition designed to promote and educate community members and families about the '40 Developmental Assets”. The 40 Developmental Assets, developed by the Search Institute, are research-proven life experiences or building blocks which all children need to grow up healthy, caring, and responsible. Research shows that the higher number of these assets a young person has, the more likely they are to thrive and to engage in positive behaviors. Research also shows that the lower number of these assets a young person has, the more likely they are to engage in risky behaviors. To learn more about SPARC, visit sparcreddeer.ca, or contact Rania Page, SPARC co-chair at 403.896.9431 or [email protected].

Follow Author

Community

SPARC Red Deer – Caring Adult Nominations open now!

Published on

Red Deer community let’s give a round of applause to the incredible adults shaping the future of our kids. Whether they’re a coach, neighbour, teacher, mentor, instructor, or someone special, we want to know about them!

Tell us the inspiring story of how your nominee is helping kids grow up great. We will honour the first 100 local nominees for their outstanding contributions to youth development. It’s time to highlight those who consistently go above and beyond!

To nominate, visit Events (sparcreddeer.ca)

Continue Reading

Addictions

‘Harm Reduction’ is killing B.C.’s addicts. There’s got to be a better way

Published on

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Susan Martinuk 

B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy

Since 2016, more than 40,000 Canadians have died from opioid drug overdoses — almost as many as died during the Second World War.
Governments, health care professionals and addiction experts all acknowledge that widespread use of opioids has created a public health crisis in Canada. Yet they agree on virtually nothing else about this crisis, including its causes, possible remedies and whether addicts should be regarded as passive victims or accountable moral agents.

Fuelled by the deadly manufactured opioid fentanyl, Canada’s national drug overdose rate stood at 19.3 people per 100,000 in 2022, a shockingly high number when compared to the European Union’s rate of just 1.8. But national statistics hide considerable geographic variation. British Columbia and Alberta together account for only a quarter of Canada’s population yet nearly half of all opioid deaths. B.C.’s 2022 death rate of 45.2/100,000 is more than double the national average, with Alberta close behind at 33.3/100,00.

In response to the drug crisis, Canada’s two western-most provinces have taken markedly divergent approaches, and in doing so have created a natural experiment with national implications.

B.C. has emphasized harm reduction, which seeks to eliminate the damaging effects of illicit drugs without actually removing them from the equation. The strategy focuses on creating access to clean drugs and includes such measures as “safe” injection sites, needle exchange programs, crack-pipe giveaways and even drug-dispensing vending machines. The approach goes so far as to distribute drugs like heroin and cocaine free of charge in the hope addicts will no longer be tempted by potentially tainted street drugs and may eventually seek help.

But safe-supply policies create many unexpected consequences. A National Post investigation found, for example, that government-supplied hydromorphone pills handed out to addicts in Vancouver are often re-sold on the street to other addicts. The sellers then use the money to purchase a street drug that provides a better high — namely, fentanyl.

Doubling down on safe supply, B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy — though for now that effort has been stymied by the courts.

According to Vancouver city councillor Brian Montague, “The stats tell us that harm reduction isn’t working.” In an interview, he calls decriminalization “a disaster” and proposes a policy shift that recognizes the connection between mental illness and addiction. The province, he says, needs “massive numbers of beds in treatment facilities that deal with both addictions and long-term mental health problems (plus) access to free counselling and housing.”

In fact, Montague’s wish is coming true — one province east, in Alberta. Since the United Conservative Party was elected in 2019, Alberta has been transforming its drug addiction policy away from harm reduction and towards publicly-funded treatment and recovery efforts.

Instead of offering safe-injection sites and free drugs, Alberta is building a network of 10 therapeutic communities across the province where patients can stay for up to a year, receiving therapy and medical treatment and developing skills that will enable them to build a life outside the drug culture. All for free. The province’s first two new recovery centres opened last year in Lethbridge and Red Deer. There are currently over 29,000 addiction treatment spaces in the province.

This treatment-based strategy is in large part the work of Marshall Smith, current chief of staff to Alberta’s premier and a former addict himself, whose life story is a testament to the importance of treatment and recovery.

The sharply contrasting policies of B.C. and Alberta allow a comparison of what works and what doesn’t. A first, tentative report card on this natural experiment was produced last year in a study from Stanford University’s network on addiction policy (SNAP). Noting “a lack of policy innovation in B.C.,” where harm reduction has become the dominant policy approach, the report argues that in fact “Alberta is currently experiencing a reduction in key addiction-related harms.” But it concludes that “Canada overall, and B.C. in particular, is not yet showing the progress that the public and those impacted by drug addiction deserve.”

The report is admittedly an early analysis of these two contrasting approaches. Most of Alberta’s recovery homes are still under construction, and B.C.’s decriminalization policy is only a year old. And since the report was published, opioid death rates have inched higher in both provinces.

Still, the early returns do seem to favour Alberta’s approach. That should be regarded as good news. Society certainly has an obligation to try to help drug users. But that duty must involve more than offering addicts free drugs. Addicted people need treatment so they can kick their potentially deadly habit and go on to live healthy, meaningful lives. Dignity comes from a life of purpose and self-control, not a government-funded fix.

Susan Martinuk is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of the 2021 book Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health Care Crisis. A longer version of this article recently appeared at C2CJournal.ca.

Continue Reading

Trending

X