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Presentation

Today, Karen Urbanoski from Canadian Insititute for Substance Use Research at UVIC and Umbrella's Team Lead, Evan James presented to over 100 interested individuals about the different understandings of addiction and implications for treatment. This dialogue provided a...
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Our favourite photographer

We have a favourite photographer and we want to tell everyone about her! Erin Ruff has been taking our staff, board and dog photos for many years, and captured our last hockey game too. We just updated our staff photos - check them out! She is wonderful to work with an...
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Lunch with Angels

Today, Sharlene and Blake joined a lovely group of community members appropriately called "Angels" for lunch and an update. Over the past year, this generous group has been doing a monthly grocery shop with the residents of Cooper and Hudson Houses. The residents are so...
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Thank you St Aidans Church

There are not enough ways to say thank you! Today St Aidans Church members donated $11, 178 to Umbrella which 100% of this donation will be applied to the downpayment for Foundation House that we are working so hard to secure. The staff and board are incredibly grateful...
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Thank you Cold Comfort!

Thank you so much to Cold Comfort for their recent fundraiser for the Umbrella Society! For the month of December, the local ice cream hot spot donated all proceeds from scoops of ice cream to the Umbrella Society. Support from the business community is always so very ...
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Christmas Fundraiser 2019

Thank you to each and every person who bought cookies for this years Umbrella Christmas Cookie Fundraiser. Sharlene spent countless hours in the kitchen whipping up her incredible (and beautiful) cookies and the support from the community was overwhelming. We raised $1,7...
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Anawim Tree 2019

One of our favorite yearly traditions is shopping for Christmas trees at Anawim House. Anawim has been a great community partner over the years and they always have the most incredible trees! A big thank you to Terry for helping Evan pick out the perfect ones for our re...
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Cold Comfort Ice Cream

This afternoon we got the chance to chat with the owner of local ice cream shop extraordinaire, Cold Comfort. They wanted to know about how Umbrella uses donations and what the impact of a fundraiser was on programs. An hour later, our Facebook lit up when we learned tha...
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Issues of Substance

We are pretty proud of our Conor who is currently in Ottawa at the Issue of Substance conference. He has been working with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and people with living experience at SOLID on cultural safety in the hospitals. Conor looks pret...
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Dr Coutts Visit

At our staff meeting on Wednesday, Dr. Joyce Coutts joined us to talk about substance use and older adults. This is an area that we all need to learn more about and we were grateful for Dr. Coutt's expertise and guidance as she provided the team with lots of helpful tips...