Fernie Kids Club Society has been hard at work since the last blog post, even if you haven't seen any action around town. You may have run into us at the fall registration fair in the Community Centre - I hear we were quite famous for our gummy bears :)

For the last many months we have been talking about opening a youth drop-in. We would love to see a facility here in Fernie that is open to all teens free of charge that is a fun & safe place to hang out with cool and informed young adults running the programming. We had been putting quite a bit of energy into this vision until September when we were suddenly stopped in our tracks.

Our mentor from Boys & Girls Clubs of Canada reminded us firmly of two important facts:

1. A youth program will only be successful if youth are directly involved from the beginning
2. Fernie has a glaring need for after-school care

So we went back to the drawing board and did a little soul searching. As much as we'd love to open a youth drop-in program right now, we are sure that it would run out of steam very quickly without a committed group of teens directing us on what they want to see. Sadly, this vision will have to wait a little longer.

And we recommitted ourselves to the idea of opening a high-quality after-school care program. This is what the community seems to be screaming out for.

PARENTS - could you please complete our short needs assessment survey online here? We need some data about who needs care and what kind of care families need most.
Thank you very, very much. Please tell other families to fill out the survey too.

And stay tuned to this space as our plans develop!

Today is the day that we received that official paperwork from the Regional District of East Kootenay telling us that we have been awarded a FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR grant from the Columbia Basin Trust. How exciting! We are psyched to get going on our Fernie Kids Club and our first order of business is to start a youth drop-in sometime in the autumn. What do you think of that? Will you come and check it out with your friends?

Also, we found out last week that we are now an official Canadian charity, so if anyone wants to give us money towards our awesome mission of after-school/evening fun for Fernie youth, you will receive a receipt for tax purposes. Yay.

Post Parade

We had a great time in the Griz Days Parade on Friday. I can't believe how many people came out to watch! We were handing out suckers with the URL of this blog so that people could look us up, but we ran out pretty early. Word on the street is that folks had no idea who we were or what we're up to. Hopefully we generated some interest and traffic to this blog.

A huge THANKS for the enthusiasm of our 'float' troupe! The kids that lent us a hand were much appreciated. I love it that we all worked together and had a great time. What a lovely experience to be in a parade with all of you :)

We know that we have a long way to go before we have programs for kids and youth up and running, but it is thanks to the wonderful Fernie Alpine Resort SUMMIT FUND that we even got this far. Thanks to a generous grant from them, we were able to become incorporated as a BC non-profit society and an official Charitable Society with Canada Revenue Agency. Thank you to the Summit Fund for seeing the potential in our idea and giving us some seed money to start!

What Can YOU Do?

If you are interested in our initiative to start a Boys & Girls Club here in Fernie, there are some ways you could help us!

If you're a young person:

• tell us what you'd like to see in Fernie for kids & teens. A drop-in? A youth centre? After school care? Particular sports or activities?
• tell us if you would like to come to the Boys & Girls Club, and why
• tell adults you know about our idea and why you're interested
• are you interested in making our idea real and you like meetings? It would be terrific to have you attend a meeting to share your thoughts. Or come more than once!
  

If you're an adult:

• what would you like to see at the Fernie Boys & Girls Club?
• can you offer office or lounging furniture for our use?
• do you know a place we could house our programs?
• do you have services to offer, like accounting/bookkeeping for example?

You can leave your comment below or contact us at fernieboysandgirls@gmail.com

Our Lame Name

We realize that our name, Fernie Kids Club Society, does not say much about who we are and in fact it's kind of lame. We apologize. Please don't hate us for it. It's a temporary name.

Our group is in the process of becoming a Boys & Girls Club but we can't officially call ourselves that until we get everything in order to BE a Boys & Girls Club. That's because the name is officially owned by Boys & Girls Clubs of Canada and they don't want just any old group to be affiliated with them. We have work to do in order to be eligible to have the honour of being part of the great Boys & Girls Club network - like make sure we have all the money we need, make sure we have a space to hold our programs, and make sure we have interesting programs and fun staff to run them. We have a lot to do, but we're excited and we're pretty sure that soon all of Fernie will be excited about this too.

In order to make our group legitimate we had to pick a name and register it with the province as a non-profit society. This means that now we can legally collect money from people who want to support us and we can get a bank account for our group to put the money in. Stuff like that. We tried to get these other 3 names but we were turned down:

1. Fernie Child and Youth Society
2. BGC Fernie Society
3. Boys and Girls Club of Fernie Society.
   

So now we are settled with Fernie Kids Club Society but hopefully it will be changed in less than a year. Even though it's got the word 'kids' in it, rest assured that our first order of business is to get a youth drop-in up and running for teens.

In the meantime, you can click on this link (same as the one above) to learn more about Boys & Girls Clubs of Canada.

And feel free to click on the word 'comments' below and leave some :)

Griz Days Parade

We're going to be in the Griz Days Parade! I am super excited. Our 'float' (if you want to call it that) is pretty different, and we're going to have some loud music and a lot of fun. The parade is tomorrow evening, Friday March 5. The start is at 6:30pm sharp. We'll be going from the front of 901 Fernie (old high school) along 2nd Ave.

Our committee, which originally started meeting a year and a half ago, is really stoked to get a Boys & Girls Club started here in Fernie. We're all adults who like kids and really care about seeing kid's lives go well. We've been meeting and talking for sooooo long now (*boring*) - it's going to be awesome to get some actual kids and teens joining with us for the parade!

We want to tell folks about what we've been doing over here working hard to get a youth drop-in started. And I also understand that there is going to be a big, fat $500 cheque for the best float. So I hope we win! We have some great plans for the young people in Fernie. If you have ideas to contribute, or questions to ask, or just want to let us know how you feel about a Boys & Girls Club in our funky little town, please comment below :)

Getting Started

Today at our Fernie Kids Club Society meeting we rounded out our Board of Directors. In addition to our president Kerri Wall and our treasurer Vanessa Oleksow, we are pleased to have Adam MacDonald in the position of Vice President and Camille Munroe (one of our Members at Large) in the acting secretary role.