Matthews House Gala raises awareness for local hospice

September 21, 2013 · 0 Comments

Matthews House Hospice held their 2nd Annual Gala event at the Nottawasaga Inn and once again had a great turnout for the event.

The gala featured a cocktail hour, dinner and an auction of many great prizes to help raise much needed funds for the hospice.

Last year, the event brought in $55,000 which had organizers hoping for roughly $75,000 this year.

Kelly Borg, director of Matthews House Hospice services, said the fundraising goes a long way with providing an important service to the community.

“We only get $38,000 from the government and our budget is $600,000 a year, so we have to do a lot of this fundraising to get money in,” she said. “This is pretty much double the size of last year in terms of people and we’re reaching out into the community and welcoming people to find out more about us.”

For the past 10 years, Matthews House has worked with people right in the community who have life-limiting illnesses, who are bereaved or are coming to the end of their lives. The need for such a service in the community has only grown since its inception, which has led to the need for more facilities and services.

“We’ve got two separate buildings, we’ve got the community hospice, which runs a whole load of counseling programs and services for people that are living with diseases or bereaved and then we’ve got a separate building that’s got four beds for people that are within seven to ten days within the end of their lives,” said Borg, adding that the residences just recently opened in August.

Since calling out to the community for help, Borg said people have answered in droves.

“We’ve been getting a fantastic reaction,” she said at the gala. “Without the help from the community in terms of money they donate to us, the volunteering that they do for us, we wouldn’t be able to open our doors. We’ve got a minimal, skeleton staff; so much of the work is done by volunteers, everything from facilitating groups, to running the house, as far as administrative tasks, everything. Without the community we’d be nowhere really.”

Tickets for the event were $125 and a plethora of prizes were on display for the highest bidder.

By Jeff Doner