Year In Review: 2025
Message from the President
2025.
A year that at times felt like five years.
Perhaps because the loss of our sweet friend and co-worker, sage and confidant, John Whalley, and all the times we’ve missed him since.
Perhaps because of the administration to the south, and its pettiness and violence at home and abroad. Shockingly, sadly, bleeding into 2026.
Perhaps, on the up-and-up and in the face of heartbreak, because of the number of important projects and spaces that were brought to life and tended to this year by the staff, volunteers, donors, and supporters of New Dawn.
Although I’m not sad to see 2025 in the rear-view mirror, I am so proud of everything we accomplished.
Over the holidays, I came across an excerpt of an interview between American playwright and screenwriter Tennessee Williams and James Grissom for Grissom’s book Follies of God. In it, Williams says, “The world is violent and merciless. It will have its way with you. We are saved only by love … love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent, being a writer, being a painter, being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it all the time is love.”
I’m not sure I feel that the world is always a burning building, but 2025 sure was. The cruelty on our news feeds and TVs is overwhelming – from social media comment sections to parliamentary incivility to wars in Gaza and Ukraine to the violence of new US immigration and drug policies.
But our work here, together, in this community, is proof that this doesn’t have to be so, that cruelty is not innate, that love (instead of judgement, rejection, shame, or just looking away) is always an option, and that it is love that transforms – those in need, our neighbourhoods, and ourselves. We are changed when we chose love, especially when it’s not easy, especially when we have to grow into it, especially when it challenges us and enables new kinds of kinship with the world around us.
Our work over this last year is also proof that it’s possible to carve out a different way of being and living than the models we’re most often presented with. One where everyone is worthy, beauty – in the places we live, the food we eat, the gatherings we join – is non-negotiable, poverty isn’t a life sentence, and there is, in fact, enough to go around.
To all of those who make New Dawn possible, thank you for your tenacity and your compassion, for giving of yourself, for staying open, for trying again, for believing in a different kind of future, for speaking it into existence, and for all the love you give to those around you.
Because of this, because of you, in 2025, New Dawn was able to:
- Provide care and nutritious snacks for more than a hundred children for the first time in our new After School Care programs in Glace Bay, Donkin, and Reserve Mines.
- Forge new relationships with the GROW Foundation, Medavie Foundation, and the J & W Murphy Foundation in service of the work we do and the work we aspire to do.
- Wrap our arms around the residents of Eleanor’s Court and Abbey Ridge II as they celebrated their first Christmas holiday together (and the tenants of The Village at Pine Tree Park and Abbey Ridge I, their second).
- Send the greatest number of meals (42,000, or almost 220 a day) out into the world via Meals on Wheels this year, and provide more care than ever through New Dawn Homecare.
- Steward the first Coordinated Access program in the CBRM into being – bringing it in line with more than 60 communities across the country that have likewise committed to a “no door is the wrong door” approach for community members experiencing homelessness.
- Welcome hundreds of new community members to Eltuek Arts Centre for the first time to experience its vibrancy and invitation to belonging because of the back-to-back exhibitions of the work of Joan Jonas (We come from the sea) and Lawren Harris (Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay).
- Provide international students and graduates and their families with access, for the first time ever, to employment and career services tailored to their needs and designed to help them find meaningful long-term employment that allows them to make the Island home.
- Put the finishing touches on a new website and logos for our upcoming 50th anniversary.
- Welcome hundreds of young people into Anchor Youth Space (in just its first few months of operations) who have found programs, services, counselling, and referrals that centre their needs, experiences, and aspirations. Every day, proof that they matter.
- Raise the walls of the New Dawn Youth and Family Centre – New Dawn’s boldest undertaking to date. A world-class community space. A commitment to the irrepressible value and gifts of young people in communities hit hard by poverty, drugs, and neglect. A love letter to Glace Bay.
This – caring, growing, supporting, dreaming, learning – is the kind of world that so many in our community want to live in.
Each year, we realize more of New Dawn’s vision, and each year, it feels as if we are only just getting started.
To another year of love and adventures – both the expected and unexpected – with you all.
Erika Shea
President/CEO, New Dawn Enterprises
