THUNDER BAY – Our Kids Count celebrated 25 years of incorporation with a community breakfast at Victoria Inn on Saturday.
Community partners, sponsors and supporters were present to celebrate the quarter-century milestone on Saturday and Executive Director Jackie Knough said she was excited to meet supporters old and new.
“There’s a lot of people that I am just actually meeting today,” she said. “But there's just been so many people that have been supporting Our Kids Count throughout the years in so many different ways and we're just so feeling really blessed to have everybody with us today.”
Our Kids Count is a community development organization that works with individuals & families to promote the health and development of children and youth in need and Gladys Beringer, former executive director, said that the impact the organization had on the community is hard to measure.
“I think we see it in the faces of our children,” she said.
“So, when you see the happy smiling faces and the parents being successful and enjoying their times with their children, I think the benefit of our kids count is going to be in the future when these children grow up and are doing amazing things in our community.”
Knough agreed with Beringer and added that the impact the organization had had was apparent in how its many programs have affected the youth throughout the years.
“We have a lot of different programs that we offer, we offer our roots of empathy program, our Big Brothers Big Sisters, our mentoring program, we just started the licensed private home childcare program in September,” she said.
“So, our kids count continuously grows. We're here celebrating our 25-year anniversary, but our programs have been just evolving as the years go by.”
To learn ore about Our Kids Count and the programming it offers, visit its website.
