philanthropy

Philanthropists raise $4 million for city initiative to help get people off the street

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / September 25, 2025 / homelessness, philanthropy, Quebec City, Ruby Pratka

Philanthropists raise $4 million for city initiative to help get people off the street

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

A philanthropic initiative spearheaded by the Ville de Québec and the Choquette family has raised nearly $4 million in four months to help people experiencing homelessness get off the street, Mayor Bruno Marchand announced on Sept. 17.

The funds raised through the Un toit avant tout (“A roof comes first”) project will be shared among several organizations helping struggling people in the city, including Lauberivière, YWCA-Québec, L’Archipel d’Entraide, Café-Rencontre Centre-Ville and Projet Intervention Prostitution Québec, to support the Porte-clés (“keychain”) initiative which gives housing-insecure people access to affordable housing and other support services.

First launched in 2015, the initiative has helped over 400 people find housing, and 85 per cent of recipients have managed to stay off the streets, according to the Ville de Québec. “Thanks to the funds raised by the campaign, a second dedicated team will be deployed, doubling the response capacity. This will allow more than 200 additional people to be supported towards residential and social stability over the next four years,” city officials said in a statement.

Marchand thanked the Choquette family – businesspeople Claude Choquette and Hélène de Grandmont and their three sons, Pierre-Thomas, Marc-Olivier and Charles-Antoine Choquette – for “having the boldness to support a cause that isn’t sexy, and for which [people] may have prejudices.” Twenty-six families or family foundations made contributions of over $100,000, which will be used for a range of services from rent subsidies to moving van rental.

“We work together, with heart and with results to … get people off the street, and once we have managed to support them in housing, they obtain residential stability,” Marchand said. “They come out of this environment where it’s hard to regain control of your life, where there’s violence, where it’s hard to regain your dignity. Porte-Clés and others work with you to ensure that we can find a way forward, so that you can rest, take care of yourself and contribute to the community according to your abilities, as a worker, a potential worker, a volunteer or a citizen … because we need you, we want to have you in this community.” For Benoit Coté, director general of PECH, which works with homeless and housing- insecure people with mental health issues in Saint-Roch, access to housing is “the spinal column” of any effort to get people off the street, and the three levels of government, the community sector and the private sector all have some responsibility. He cited a La Presse report based on data from the Quebec coroner’s office which found that over 100 homeless people died on the province’s streets last year. “This is a public health problem that goes beyond one level of government.” He called on the provincial government to create a transpartisan commission to address the situation, adding that the presence of privately funded projects “doesn’t mean [public] institutions should diminish their involvement.”

Stéphanie Lampron, executive director of YWCA- Québec, said the funding boost for the Porte-Clés program would allow organizations like hers to better co-ordinate to help people in need. “We all have different expertise, and we’re putting it together at the service of the common good. We provide beds for women waiting for housing, but if they need help with money management, I can send them to Lauberivière, and if they need mental health support, I can send them to PECH. We’ve been working together for 10 years, but this allows us to take it to another level.”

To learn more or to make a donation, visit fdg.ca/pages/un-toit-avant-tout.

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Christmas Hamper Campaign in final push to meet 2024 goal

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / March 18, 2025 / Community Christmas Hamper Campaign, philanthropy, Quebec City, Ruby Pratka, SPA de Québec

Christmas Hamper Campaign in final push to meet 2024 goal

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

More than two months after delivering its last hamper, the 2024 Quebec Community Christmas Hamper Campaign is still striving to reach its $50,000 fundraising goal. As of March 11, the campaign had raised $45,157.

“We are not too far off, but expenses are a bit more significant than in the past, so even with $50,000, we are a little bit in the hole,” campaign spokesperson Brigitte Wellens told the QCT. Wellens, who has been involved with the annual fundraiser for about a decade, said 2024 was “one of the first years” that the $50,000 goal hadn’t been reached by the end of the campaign, although organizers were still waiting for numbers from the last few fundraising events.

In previous years, she said, “We’ve always reached the goal with donations that have trickled in over the holidays.”

Wellens said the rising cost of living and the postal strike which kept people from mail- ing in donations through much of November and December might have had an impact on donors’ giving habits. Demand for food aid has also risen – more than 280 households received a Christmas hamper in 2024, a 12 per cent increase from the previous year.

What Wellens has witnessed echoes current trends – over the past decade, according to Canada Helps, the number of Canadians making charitable donations has gone down continually, while the number of people relying on the services of Canadian nonprofits has continued to rise. “With the current financial situation across the country, with everything costing more – food, rent, interest rates – it was kind of like a perfect storm,” Wellens said. “Things have not stabilized and people have been hurting financially a bit more than they have in the past. It’s a sad reality.”

She added that the number of people who donated to this past year’s campaign is about the same as in previous years. “Maybe potentially, some people had to give a little less because costs were rising. Those who were able to give more did give more, and others gave what they were able.” She said the difficulty the hamper campaign faced in meeting its goal was “maybe a wakeup call that our community isn’t doing so well” financially.

The CCHC is not the only lo- cal nonprofit which has struggled to raise funds amid the rising cost of living. “We had an objective to raise $100,000 with our [year-end] campaign, but we aren’t reaching it,” said Karina Painchaud of the SPA de Québec, which relies heavily on donations to care for more than 7,000 stray animals in the city every year. “It’s hard to say without a doubt why we didn’t reach our goal – the postal strike has hurt us, and the other thing is the amount of money in people’s pockets. The cost of living has gone up, the cost of food has gone up, and there’s a limit to what people can pay.”

Neither Painchaud nor Wellens intends to let fundraising struggles impact the support given to those who need it. “If the annual campaign doesn’t work, we’re going to have to think of something else,” Painchaud said.

“No one who has asked for a hamper has ever been told they couldn’t receive one, and that is going to remain our goal going forward,” Wellens said. “Things are not getting less expensive, but that doesn’t mean we’ll start turning people away. We’re going to have to strategize.”

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Community foundations merge to create single entity

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / February 4, 2025 / philanthropy, Quebec City, Quebec City English-speaking Community Foundation, Ruby Pratka

Community foundations merge to create single entity

Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

The Jeffery Hale Foundation, the Saint Brigid’s Home Foundation and the Citadel Foundation have merged their operations to form the Quebec City English-speaking Community Foundation, representatives of the merged foundation announced last week. The amalgamation had been in the cards for the last several years and had been approved by the memberships of all three foundations, they said. The three foundations have shared a single executive team since 2007 and a single investment committee for at least two decades.

“We’ve co-operated and co-ordinated on many projects over the years, all three foundations, and we serve the same clientele – that is, the English-speaking community, its institutions, its elderly, health and social services, education, heritage and community development,” explained Martin Edwards, board chair of the new foundation.

Edwards said the merger will simplify the day-to-day philanthropic efforts of all three foundations. “We [used to have] the same staff, similar memberships, same bankers, same auditors, et cetera, but … three annual general meetings, three audited financial statements, three tax returns … three channels of communication for every joint project that we worked on, three brokerage statements, three bank statements, three of everything. Costs and expenses were multiplied by three. What we are targeting in this amalgamation is really unity, efficiency and improved investment opportunities.”

“We will continue to honour the commitments of those three foundations and pursue and improve on their work going forward,” said Edwards, adding that donors will still be able to specify which project or organization under the foundation’s umbrella their donation will fund.

Edwards, executive director Michael Boden and assistant executive director Julie Sauvageau presented the amalgamation as a natural progression. “Pooling financial resources, pooling expertise, pooling human resources just seemed to be the logical step,” Boden told the QCT. In recent decades, the three foundations have gradually absorbed the assets of smaller community foundations and philanthropic funds and taken responsibility for administering their assets. Edwards said the merged foundation would continue its predecessors’ work in many areas, including the administration of the Citadel Foundation and Quebec City Women’s Club bursary programs for English-speaking students, and administrative support for organizations serving the English-speaking community.

Edwards said the merger would eliminate competition and overlap between the three foundations and make it easier to fund large projects. The new foundation will have combined assets of $87 million, Boden said, and an estimated $4 million will be distributed to projects in the community in the coming year. Major projects on the foundation’s funding agenda include the Cathedral Gardens at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity and the sports field at the yet-to-be-named consolidated English high school. The foundation also aims to provide ongoing support to Mount Hermon Cemetery, Jeffery Hale Community Partners and the Fraser Recovery Program, which supports English-speaking youth recovering from substance abuse issues and their families, among others.

Anyone interested in donating to the Quebec City English-speaking Community Foundation or sharing comments and suggestions is invited to email contact@qcesf.org.

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