After 28 years the REAPS office has moved from 1950 Gorse Street, beside the Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park, to the Industrial Forestry Service (IFS) location at 1595 Fifth Avenue as of Feb. 28.
It’s been a week and executive director Terri McClymont said she’s settling into the new office quite nicely and is very grateful to IFS for the space.
REAPS is now on the hunt for the ideal location to move the REAPS Compost Demonstration Garden, which will be relocated in April.
There are five location options and each one will be carefully considered before a decision is made, McClymont said.
“It’s been quite positive with partners coming forward and that’s exciting,” McClymont said. “We will look at taking the opportunity to make the Compost Demonstration Garden bigger. People would come and eat their lunch there, they would take photos and walk around, so I would like to expand that public engagement area and the seating area and have even more composting units so we could have more businesses composting their waste with us. Also having community gardens again is important so we’d like more space as food security is very important right now.”
McClymont said with the community’s continued support she knows REAPS will find its own niche once again where they will best serve the community.
“We will move forward and look to create something even better,” McClymont said.
In the meantime, REAPS continues to offer its school programming with an average of four presentations a week.
“We’ll keep everyone posted about where we’re going through Facebook or the website,” McClymont said. “We’re still in the community and we’ve got some exciting things planned for summer programming that will be announced at a later date.”
REAPS greatly appreciates the three decades of funder support and the dedicated volunteers that built and maintained the garden and hopes that the community will continue this support as REAPS works through this transition, McClymont added.
Summer programming including camps, daycares and community groups will still be taking place within the community.
Inquiries may be sent to the REAPS board at directors@reaps.org. For more information about recycling and composting visit www.reaps.org.
