AUDIO: New Dawn celebrates 50 years

New Dawn was founded fifty years ago with the vision of a self-reliant community: a community that is empowered to solve its own problems and shape its own future.

This was at a time when the coal and steel industries were declining and government agencies were leading community development in Cape Breton. Father Greg MacLeod looked to the Antigonish Movement as a model, and played a major role in the early days of New Dawn.

“My memory of it is there was just a series of problems, and Greg inspired everybody that we could make it better. It was a very practical, problem-solving approach that we started with,” Rankin MacSween remembered in an interview with Mainstreet Cape Breton host, Wendy Bergfeldt to mark New Dawn’s 50th anniversary.

MacSween was brought in early by Fr. MacLeod as the organization’s executive director, and went on to lead the organization for more than three decades as its President and CEO until his retirement in 2021.

Erika Shea, who took over as President and CEO at that time and was instrumental in many of New Dawn’s major projects as the Vice-President of Development in the years before that, told Bergfeldt that New Dawn continues to address the challenges of an ever-changing community.

“I think that one of the themes that is quite consistent over New Dawn’s 50 years is its inclination to listen really carefully, and sometimes you’re listening for something just above a whisper, and so we’re always asking ourselves the questions: what are the significant needs? Are we the right organization to try to meet those needs? What partners do we share values with and think can help us deliver the best possible outcome for the community,” Shea said.

“The community is always changing, the community’s needs are always changing, but one of the gifts that New Dawn has is its breadth connects us to a lot of those different communities, so through New Dawn Homecare, Meals on Wheels, we’re spending time with seniors and elders in the community and their families. Through the work that we’re doing at Anchor Youth Space and the Youth Centre in Glace Bay and Abbey Ridge, we’re ever more connected to young people in our community. CBICI connects us to newcomers — so we’ve got our fingers on multiple pulses in the community and so you’re just constantly analyzing and synthesizing, and the gaps, the themes, the needs present themselves to you.”

The New Dawn of today, which employs over 150 people and serves over 300 people through its programs and projects, looks very different from the New Dawn of ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, and Shea said New Dawn’s leadership team is always balancing the needs of the community with the financial resources and organizational capacity.

“We’re moving pieces around on a chess board all the time so that we can continue to develop each of our eighteen different companies into their full potential and meet new needs that are emerging,” she said. “It’s always been quite liberating for us to know that New Dawn has built, New Dawn has sold, New Dawn has acquired, renovated, repurposed, and that’s going to continue indefinitely as long as the organization continues to do its work in the community.”

Listen to Rankin MacSween and Erika Shea’s full interview with Wendy Bergfeldt on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet Cape Breton here.