The Rowan House Society recently released its 2024/2024 Report to the Community.
Each year, the report provides a look at the organization's efforts to support individuals affected by domestic violence and abuse, with information on Rowan House's various programs as well as a look at its revenue and expenses.
Their 24-hour support line saw a total of 2,294 calls or texts, about a 15 per cent increase from the year prior, totalling 15,779 minutes.
Rowan House’s Safe at Home Program was also reintroduced during the last fiscal year.
The program provides support to those using domestic violence and abuse, says Executive Director, Linette Soldan.
“It’s an important program because it helps get to the root causes of domestic violence and abuse. What we do is we provide ‘cool down’ opportunities, we provide one-to-one support from an outreach lens, but we also provide group sessions. It’s really important to have conversations about accountability and, additionally, how they can have a healthy relationship.”
Another program that saw growth was the Preventative Education Program, which includes Healthy Relationships groups for women, presentations to the public, and presentations made in local schools.
“One of the things that we’re very happy about being able to do is we’re not only offering them in High River and Okotoks, but we’ve also expanded our reach to Nanton and we’re looking at opening it up to Vulcan and Diamond Valley,” says Soldan.
Over the course of the year, the program’s facilitators provided 125 programs to 6,230 students, an increase of 25 per cent from the year prior.
Soldan pointed out one notable difference year over year concerning Rowan House’s emergency shelter services.
While the number of clients stayed relatively consistent from year to year, the average length of their stays has increased.
“What I will say is that we’re noticing that with a lack of safe and affordable housing, individuals could be staying longer in the emergency shelter stage. We do have a 30-day stay, and on a case-to-case basis, we will review and do an analysis as to what is the best support moving forward. We want to make sure they have a safe place to move to, depending on what their needs are, but are finding the average length of stay was a little longer this last fiscal year.”
The Rowan House Society is approaching 25 years in operation, having been founded in Black Diamond in 2000.
Soldan provided a message to the community as we approach another year and that major milestone.
“We will not stand by and leave individuals to face violence and abuse alone. Our clients will continue to be the heart of everything we do as we continue to improve our client service delivery processes and systems, and ease of access for our clients to the different services we provide. Every endeavour we take will be to develop new partnerships and build stronger alliances to further enhance our clients' service delivery.”