This past Tuesday we heard from Martin Dugas, the CEO of Wellspring Edmonton. Wellspring is a non-profit cancer support organization founded in Toronto in 1992, and has recently opened a new branch in Edmonton in June 2017.
Wellspring provides educational and nonmedical support programs for persons impacted by cancer, including patients, caregivers and family members. Their programs are offered at no cost to participants and are funded by private donations, both institutional and personal. They are located in a new twelve thousand square foot building located on the South Campus of the University of Alberta. This building was built and paid for by the local community. They currently have four full time staff and over one hundred volunteers who provide forty different programs to just over fifteen hundred participants. They also have many more volunteers who help in other ways to support their facility and programs. Each participant takes part in seven different programs on average. The average participant is fifty-four years of age.
The programs they provide include educational talks, patient support groups, the Look Good Feel Better program, exercise opportunities such as yoga, qigong, ACE (Alberta Cancer Exercise), therapy programs such as Reiki and Relaxation and Visualisation. They also offer Arts programs such as Painting, Sculpting, Fibre Arts, Carving, Singing, various instrumental music programs and nutrition programs such as Be Well Eat Well and cooking programs.
All of their programs give participants something to look forward to and provide opportunities to meet new people and enjoy themselves. They also give people a way to express and work through their trauma, and sometimes even forget their pain by giving them something else to think about. They aim to help people to live well despite their circumstances, to live each day the best that they can and look forward to the future.
They are always looking for volunteers to help in any way that they can from helping with building maintenance, to offering programs to making donations. They expect their programs to keep expanding as nine thousand new cancer diagnoses are made each year at the Cross Cancer Hospital in Edmonton.
