'It's a huge loss': Prince Albert group concerned about closure of innovative social issues program

A Prince Albert community group is worried about the shutdown of a program that saw social agencies work together to find solutions for problems in the northern Saskatchewan city.

For years, a wide-ranging group of social agencies has shared information and offered solutions to larger social problems in the Prince Albert area through the Centre of Resonsibility, or COR, program. Now, the program has announced its plans to cease operations in June.

"It's a huge loss in our community's ability to identify all these factors and having those long-term responses," said Wes Clark, executive director of the Prince Albert Outreach Program. "P.A. is not like other communities."

The centre's origins go back to 2011, when then-police chief Dale McFee brought together a diverse group, including the Saskatchewan Rivers Public School Division, the Ministry of Social Services and the Prince Albert Grand Council, among others, to regularly work together.

Out of those meetings came Prince Albert Community Mobilization and the Prince Albert Hub, a group that meets bi-weekly to assess risks to the community, looking at the unique needs of at-risk individuals and families and intervening in situations before they become problems. 

While the Hub model has been widely accepted across the province, with 14 tables running in Saskatchewan, Prince Albert went one step further. It created the Centre of Responsibility — a group that looked at broader trends in the city, including drug abuse and domestic violence.

Since it began, the centre has done everything from setting up a program that allowed hunters to donate wild meat to the Prince Albert Food Bank to a study on how to battle school truancy.

"It helped us identify some things we weren't aware of," said Clark. "They have that ear to the ground … on what's going on in the community."

The centre decided to shut down, primarily because its partner agencies had a hard time finding employees to assign to the association.

"We came to the realization that we just don't have … the human resources here locally in Prince Albert to be able to confidently move forward with the plan," said steering committee co-chair Tom Michaud.

"So we came forward with the difficult decision to cease operations."

The province's Ministry of Corrections and Policing said it plans to recreate the Centre of Responsibility model provincially and share data between various Hub programs in Saskatchewan.

However, Clark worries the provincial focus won't be useful to Prince Albert.

"We're not Saskatoon, we're not Regina," he said. "We have different concerns up here."