A Williams Lake city councillor got her hands dirty as she made good on a promise from a city council meeting in March 2024.
At a lengthy and heated city council meeting March 26, 2024, when the city council voted 4-2 in favour of supporting a BC Housing application to locate a new emergency homeless shelter at 98 First Avenue South, many expressed fear of what would happen.
After hearing a number of members of the community come forward in opposition to the shelter, Coun. Joan Flaspohler urged the community to come together for positive solutions to help address the issues around homelessness in the downtown.
“I am an action person, not someone who just vocalizes on a personal level on social media but does nothing,” she said as she addressed the community at the March meeting.
At the meeting, Flaspohler emphasized the need for partnerships within the community and while she acknowledged the location of the shelter was not ideal in many ways, she encouraged people to do what they could to support the project and the homeless population in moving forward.
Flaspohler has a background in horticulture and worked as a gardener and horticulturalist for the city of Williams Lake in their landscaping and gardening with Public Works from 1995 to 2013. She was lead hand for many of those years and during this period, Williams Lake won provincial and national recognition in the Communities in Bloom program for floral displays.
So throughout the process, Flaspohler has been talking to shelter operators from Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), coming up with some ideas for how she could put her skills to use in supporting the shelter project.
When the shelter was getting close to opening, she coordinated with CMHA to purchase a few plants to get the process started, taking care of the plants at her house until CMHA was ready to put a few planters in place at the new building. She said due to the late season, after construction delays pushed back the shelter opening, it was limited for selection, but she got what she could to get a start on her promise.
On July 9, Flaspohler led CMHA staff and some of their clients working on different employment skills in filling a number of cedar planters which will help bring a little life to the Roots on First shelter facility, for clients and the community.
"We know that we're in challenging times, and I just really truly feel that we need to be collaborative and try to work as a team to make things better," she told the Tribune.
