2024: Year in Review

As we bid the year adieu, we do so knowing that thirty-five of our neighbours, friends, and family now have – in The Village at Pine Tree Park – a warm, safe, dependable, and loving place to lay their heads. We do so, as well, knowing that on the other side of 2024, the same will be true for twenty-five more community members as they settle into their permanent home in Eleanor’s Court.

More than anything, as we step into 2025, we are filled with gratitude, relief, and hope. Housing is a human right. Without shelter, little else is possible. With shelter, the once unimaginable – warmth on cold days, good food, good health, quiet nights, and new goals – is within reach.

This was a year that stretched us. It shook us up. It challenged what we thought we were capable of. It tested our ingenuity and resolve. And it invited us to open our hearts in a different kind of way.

The path to the Village at Pine Tree Park, was an uneven one. Alongside an outpouring of joy, generosity, and celebration, deep pockets of anger and judgement. Glow signs, stickers, fliers, social media pages all drawing lines around who was welcome and who was not, who had to be guarded against, and who protected.

There is almost always something else lying just below anger and judgement – two feelings perhaps better thought of as the final stages of an emotional chemical reaction. Anguish, fear, vulnerability, sadness, loneliness, powerlessness, a sense of being forgotten and left behind. Feelings we don’t want to feel because they are more likely to end in tears than placards, and so we bury them in favour of a more fashionable outrage and indignation.

2024 asked us to make space for this; to try to understand this different kind of pain and to respond to moments of misinformation and panic with compassion.

2024 asked us to make space for this, and to press on. Acknowledging both that this pain is real and mounting and that it is possible and necessary to safely house the most vulnerable among us in our communities.

In service of a more vibrant and self-reliant community, alongside the work of many to bring The Village at Pine Tree Park and Eleanor’s Court into being, in 2024:

• The Cape Breton Island Centre for Immigration grew to offer language services to newcomers and – for the first time, Temporary Foreign Workers – across the Island
• Eltuek hosted Steve Wadden’s striking photo exhibit, Living History, marking the 25th anniversary of the transformative Donald Marshall Jr. Supreme Court decision
• New Dawn Homecare continued its growth, expanding its nursing services to include footcare community clinics in addition to in-home footcare services
• We broke ground on a new Youth and Family Centre in Glace Bay, a project whose scale, beauty, and impact even now – with increasingly detailed designs and renderings in hand – continues to overwhelm our imagination in the best way

• On the heels of opening Abbey Ridge – our first youth supportive housing project in Glace Bay – we acquired a second home to make space for the many young people searching for a safe place to find themselves and discover their gifts
• Our Meals on Wheels team grew in meals and volunteers, and added the provision of 35 meals twice daily to The Village at Pine Tree Park to their daily cooking and deliveries
• We realized a dream a decade in the making with the design and planning of a 49-seat New Dawn Early Childhood Education Centre in the Glace Bay Youth and Family Centre
• Residents of the Pine Tree Park Care Home (formerly New Dawn Guest Home) began to think through their preferences and hopes as they plan for a return to community-living with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Remedy’s steady move towards the closure of community facilities like the Care Home.
• We joined with the Cape Breton Youth Project, Undercurrent, and BGC Cape Breton to bring an Integrated Youth Services (youth mental health) site to the CBRM

It was a year of growth, listening, taking action, new relationships, striving for excellence, and looking towards what we know to be our community’s unbelievably beautiful future. In the words of Angela Davis, African American feminist political activist, philosopher, author, and academic, it was a year of acting as if it were possible to radically transform the world and doing it all the time.

Erika Shea
President/CEO, New Dawn Enterprises