Steinbach Family Resource Centre celebrates 25 years
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Steinbach Family Resource Centre is celebrating 25 years of serving families in the Southeast.
“It’s really exciting. It’s sort of a milestone for the organization because now we see families coming to us who came to us then their parents were pregnant,” said executive director Jo-Anne Dalton. “We’ve kind of come full circle this quarter century.”
Steinbach Family Resource Centre was founded 25 years ago to support pregnancy, prenatal and postnatal moms so that they have healthy pregnancies, and that they were getting the nutrition and the education they needed for healthy pregnancy development.
“We have evolved since then because obviously the need for those things does not stop when babies are born or turn six months old,” said Dalton. “We’ve expanded our programming to reach the whole childhood realm. We continue those programs all the way until children go to kindergarten or up until the age of six.”
Dalton said a lot of families get referred to the centre by word of mouth. This word of mouth has increased the programing from a couple of times a week in a small centre to the current large centre on North Front Drive where multiple programs are offered every day, a major milestone in the organization’s history.
“It’s really been amazing to look back and see how the growth has happened,” said Dalton.
Some other milestones seen in the 25 years of SFRC are changing its name from Anna’s House to SFRC to better reflect the service and resources that it offered to the community. In 2016, the centre expanded its programming into food education. In 2025, family programming will take a leap in growth from three preschool sessions to four sessions a week and its family groups for toddlers from six to 18 months and 18 to 36 months are happening regularly.
“We went through a restructure this fall that would allow us to really meet the needs of families better,” said Dalton, who attributes the success of SFRC to community support.
A highlight every year for SFRC is their annual scavenger hunt. This will be the fifth year that local businesses will be participating and sponsoring the hunt.
“We’re hoping it will be the biggest and the best year. It has become our flagship event. It’s quite unique.”
The future looks bright for SFRC as it just received its commercial kitchen licence, which will help with its food programming.
Last year, SFRC saw an increase of 673 families walk through its doors.