Cornerstone Community Residences Inc.

As some of you may know, my DH & I have been trying to start group homes for children with disabilities, basically the high needs children, the ones that are hard to place. Anyways, when we were in Ontario we managed to start a corporation and become a charity. We had a builder who was willing to build for us to our specifications and then lease the home to us. We had gotten pretty far except our organization would have never been operational because of several factors, mostly we couldn't get any response from our community Child & Family Services, for whatever reason, we even had an MP trying to speak to them on our behalf. Anyways, our idea was to move to Winnipeg & try again. We decided to start over, we are waiting to incorporate until we get the go ahead from Child & Family Services (it gets costly starting companies that don't become operational). Unfortunately for us there is an increasing amount of children coming into care each year & in Manitoba the majority are Aboriginal children. Another unfortunate part is that the kids are becoming increasingly more high needs. FASD(Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder) contributes to the majority of Aboriginal children coming into care & FASD is 100% preventable! Our goal is to provide culturally appropriate homes for these high needs children (alternative care placements). In order for us to do this we need to write & submit a proposal to WCFS(Winnipeg Child & Family Services) to get a pre approval for licensing. This proposal has been a long time coming. I decided to finally write it, as the worst thing that WCFS could say would be "NO". Our proposal is being submitted on Wed July 11th. There is basically a 95% chance of them approving us for licensing. I'm basically writing about our organization for prayer. Prayer because I am very scared that our proposal is actually going to be accepted. I'm slowly coming to the realization that my life may be changing as I know it. I'm not sure how long we will have to wait for a response but I have a feeling that it won't be long as there is a HUGE need for our home. Our goal is to have the best organization in Winnipeg and to grow to have several houses. This actually may happen very quickly! I have a lot to learn, & our next steps after pre approval are huge steps to accomplish. "I can do all things through HIM who gives me strength" All I ask for is prayer!


Andy's Notes: I may decide to delete this post as this news should probably be private for many reasons but for right now please read & pray. Thanks