A funding boost for the Welcome Centre Shelter for Women and Families.
The centre received a grant late last year worth slightly over $72,000 from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
The funds were used to create additional office spaces, a private phone room for clients and a new private space for clients to meet with representatives from different agencies.
Centre executive director Lady Laforet says several new spaces have been created in the building.
"We've been in it for about two years now so we recognize that we had some outstanding needs and it get gave us an opportunity to create spaces for staff and for clients to be able to more efficiently use the space and increase their access to things like a phone room or harm reduction or medical offices," says Laforet.
She says the shelter wanted to enhance the availability and access for clients with the grant.
"We recognize that a lot of the core staff, clients who needed to access where really sort of like back of house and hard to find," she says. "So we bumped them up moved them right to front of house so clients would have increase accessibility and then we were able to do some things, knock off some things from our strategic plan which was creating a private phone room for some of our clients, so that they would have some privacy when their using phone outside of their units."
Laforet says without the grant, the enhancements at the site would not be possible.
"We're really strapped in terms of operating dollars," says Laforet. "The new space has been quite expensive, we've expanded services so capital to this scale is likely not something that we would have been able to accomplish without the partnership from Ontario Trillium Foundation."
Provincial NDP leader Marit Stiles and Windsor West MPP Lisa Gretzky were at the shelter Wednesday morning for a tour of the facility.
The welcome centre is located in downtown Windsor on Tuscarora Street.
The shelter has been at that location for the past two years. It has 32 beds for single women, and rooms for families that can support up to 29 families.
The centre supports roughly 1000 women and children annually for short term shelter support and housing assistance.