EMILY HSUEH
FORT COULONGE
Sept. 30, 2020
L’EntourElle, a woman’s shelter located in Fort Coulonge, held its annual general meeting last Wednesday, Sept. 30. The meeting was held over Zoom to avoid an in-person gathering.
They started off their meeting with the election of their president and secretary, which were . . .
Rhonda Perry and Gisèle Mousseau respectively. Their treasurer is Louise Bastien.
In the last year, the shelter had an accommodation rate of 111.35%. They discovered women were staying in the shelter for longer periods of time, from 49 days to 91, according to Ashley Nadeau, coordinator for the organization. They credited this to a lack of housing options due to flooding.
“The women are staying in the shelter for longer than usual because there is no housing available, no apartments,” Nadeau said.
In addition, L’EntourElle has had an uptick in calls in the past year, and have had 130 different meetings with women and 104 meetings with youths as a part of their outreach program. Some meetings were to follow up with some of the women who they had met with previously.
The shelter had also scheduled meetings and discussions in the community, including talks in high schools before the pandemic hit. While Nadeau said COVID did not impact their normal operations, there are still measures in place that they had to implement in the year. They had to cancel their annual fundraiser and talks in the community, but says the schools are still permitting them to come in and speak with students.
In the near future, L’EntourElle is taking their talks online, as they will be starting up a series of video sketches on their Facebook page to better reach women.
“Seeing that our awareness and prevention is not as present as it was before… our youth group worker and community worker will be doing that through our Facebook page, Nadeau said. “So everything that we would talk about in the communities, or even in the high schools, we will have little video sketches on our Facebook page with the same information that we would give out to the community. We’re adapting.”
