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Spencer House Senior Centre
Room to Grow
Each year, CUA awards a number of grants as part of its Community Investment Grant Program to recipients who create positive social and economic impact. In 2022, Spencer House Senior Centre was one such recipient and was awarded a $2,000 grant. We caught up with Spencer House’s Executive Director Allison Davis and Program Coordinator Erin Stacknick to discuss the grant and its impact on their services.
Located in Halifax’s South End, Spencer House Senior Centre offers a variety of programs for its members.
“We’re a community centre with a senior focus,” explains Allison Davis, Executive Director of Spencer House. “We function like a hub for older adults. The first place they think to call is Spencer House. We could get questions from ‘What’s the name of that store on the corner, and can you give me their phone number?’ to ‘How can you help us access a government resource?’”
The Centre offers a drop-in program from Monday to Friday, which includes a hot meal at lunch time. Over the summer, Spencer House also started a breakfast program. Sharing a space with the daycare centre upstairs, the organization often sees visitors across multiple generations. “It’s not uncommon to have the daycare children from upstairs to come downstairs and join us for programs or visiting,” Allison says. “They sometimes make artwork for the seniors, and for Christmas they write cards or make little gifts. But also, folks will come in with their children or grandchildren.”
In recent years, Allison explains that there’s been a clear growth in demand for their services.
“We are actually seeing a demand beyond our capacity at the moment. We’re in a transition time of trying to figure out what that growth looks like and how we meet the demand, especially for folks who are of low income or living in poverty, and with current inflation exacerbating the situation.”
There are plenty of programs offered at the Centre; exercise classes incorporate activities like yoga and chair dancing, while workshops and education programs cover subjects of interest to older adults.
All of these programs are aimed at keeping people active and socially connected. Allison notes that a key point of strength for rural areas of Nova Scotia is in keeping people connected, with folks looking out for their neighbours. While the same can still be true in the city, “people can get lost.”
Erin Stacknick, Spencer House’s Program Coordinator, discusses the importance of shifting focus as the needs of the people they serve change. She explains that, especially after the pandemic, there was a greater need for food accessibility and that many of their programs now address food insecurity.
As part of CUA’s 2022 Community Investment Grant Program, Spencer House received $2,000 to implement a tower garden aeroponic system to increase the number of fresh vegetables in resident meals. To assist with their tower garden, they also created a network of volunteers who formed their Garden Club, a group which met weekly throughout the summer to grow vegetables and build connections. 
Allison explains that many of the members had decades of gardening experience, and jokes that “They were teaching me most of the time!”
Given that most members live without balconies or outdoor spaces of their own, the Garden Club gave them access to continue doing what they love.
“It gets people outside into nature,” says Erin. “A lot of our programs are inside, so it’s nice to have one that gets you to spend some time outside together.
Each Monday, the club would gather to tend the garden. As the summer progressed, the club was able to harvest the vegetables, which were then incorporated into daily meals for everyone at the centre.
Once the gardening season came to an end, rather than disbanding, the group redirected its focus. They started getting together to make both fruit and fresh salads, paint pots, and even raise butterflies.
This butterfly program, additionally made possible through the grant, allowed the group to raise and release painted lady butterflies. Erin explains how special this was.
“We grew them from little larvae, looked after them and fed them.” The organization who sent the butterflies also sent a poem to go with them. “So, we had a member read this poem while we released them onto the front deck. And we invited the daycare kids down to join. It was great because we watched them grow the whole summer.”
“We got a lot out of the grant,” Erin says.
The last project involved setting up the indoor tower garden, which functions with LED lights so that it can grow year-round. “We have that set up in our kitchen,” Erin explains. “We are currently growing two different kinds of lettuce and baby greens and those will go into our meal program too.”
“We’ve always been trying to incorporate more fresh vegetables and greens, and that was one of the goals with the CUA grant, to be able to offer salad three times a week.”
Given the program’s success, plans are already in the works for it to continue again next summer.
Erin shares, “There are a lot of gardeners in the club—there were a few people who were new to gardening, but most had gardens throughout their lives.” Maintaining and developing this access to gardening is key for the seniors’ mental health.
In the meantime, Spencer House plans to redesign their outdoor space with an age-friendly focus to improve its accessibility.
“As soon as the back courtyard is complete and accessible, we will have a lot more opportunities,” Erin says. “There will be greater access to gardening for everybody. It will just be a lot easier to have more people included.”
“We have a full design, and we’ve been slowly chipping away at finding funding for it because it’s quite a large project,” Allison says. “We also have plans for sharing that knowledge with the children upstairs.”
Allison explains the plan to mentor the children on “Appreciating where our food comes from, watching things grow, and how to nurture that. There’s a lot of sharing that can happen there.”
Of the grant, Erin explains how happy they are with having had the opportunity to do three projects within one. “It was a great experience, a lot of people benefited from it.”
“We’re very grateful,” Allison says. “It was an investment in us that is helping us achieve goals, now we’re able to move forward and grow even more.”