Correspondence: Relmagine West Shore Grant-in-Aid Cover Letter

Re: Relmagine West Shore Community Society Grant-in-Aid Application for 2025

Relmagine West Shore is pleased to submit the attached Grant-in-Aid Application to the Town of View Royal together with our annual reporting for 2024.

We hope you will find our Grant Application Form to be in order and that you will accept our separate budget documents in lieu of completing the embedded form. Our Making Shift Happen (Dec 31/24) document shares our annual reporting for 2024 together with our plans for 2025. We believe this format will offer you a clearer picture of how our volunteer-run organization has operated over the past year and is building on that experience to fuel our work in 2025.

VOLUNTEER AND CITIZEN PARTICIPATION:

Volunteers form the backbone of Relmagine West Shore. Our non-profit society is led by a volunteer board of West Shore residents and we collaborate extensively with other community organizations, local governments and passionate individuals invested in building a sustainable West Shore. We work to engage as many View Royal residents as possible in our work as we endeavour to meet folks wherever they are at the intersection of our cost-of-living challenges and climate change. Relmagine engaged 103 volunteers in 2024, who invested 1,304 hours of their time in service of community. 336.5 of those hours were invested by the 24 community volunteers involved in the Power Play event held in View Royal on July 28/24. We were grateful for the town's terrific support of our work in 2024 and it was exciting for us to anchor our 2024 marquee event at the beautiful Scottish Centre and Craigflower Manor National Historic Site. Congratulations again to Mayor Tobias for his Power Chef cook-off success!

This year we're delivering more practical solutions to help members of the public build knowledge and hands-on skills to save money while supporting the planet:

• Free workshops which teach people how to cook with local in-season and affordable ingredients, grow and preserve their own food, or learn how to repair their own clothes. Our first workshop of 2025 (creating a Cozy Veggie Chowder) was full with a wait-list large enough to create a new class, and our Container Gardening and Building Incredible Soil Workshops with the Compost Education Centre are both full and taking names for their wait-lists. The community service demand is clearly there and growing.
• Events like our Repair Cafés, where we bring community handy folk together with citizens who have basic household items in need of repair. These free events are not only keeping waste out of the landfill, they are also building community connections as folks gather together and have a chance to pause, enjoy a cup of tea and a snack and meet other community members while they wait to be helped. Our February 22/25 offering was our most successful yet!
• Our annual Swap & Shop celebrates Upcycling and keep more textiles out of the landfill, and in 2025 we're looking at expanding this to include a holiday swap & shop where people can discover fabulous finds to support their Halloween and Christmas decorating ambitions.
• West Shore Seedy Saturday - our 2nd annual event is coming up on March 8th at Belmont Secondary School and it's almost twice as big as our 2024 offering. It features plenty of terrific connections for community members interested in growing their own food and habitat for pollinators, including expert speakers throughout the day.
• West Shore Tomato Challenge - will give hundreds of West Shore residents the opportunity to obtain a free tomato seedling and take part in a friendly regional growing challenge to get more folks engaged in growing their own!

Our Making Shift Happen booklet provides a comprehensive look at what we have planned for 2025 and will illustrate how our collaborative network has grown over the past year as more organizations recognise the effectiveness of our community outreach approach.

Thank you for this opportunity to again apply for funding support through the Town of View Royal's Grant-in-Aid Program.

If you have any questions or require further information/clarification, please reach out to me at 250.857.7821.

Kind regards,

Cindy Moyer President connect@reimagineus.ca