Southern Frontenac Community Services

Duncan Sinclair | Aug 03, 2022

Those of us here in Frontenac's Townships have many blessings to count. I have lived in Southern Frontenac full-time for the past 22 years and before that as a seasonal resident since 1967. The peace, quiet, beauty, and diversity of the forests, lakes, and fields in which we live is, for me at least, impossible to beat, combined as it is with our easy proximity to Kingston's urban facilities. For retired folks like me, the combination of the idyll of country life with the security of nearby Kingston's rich cultural and highly specialized healthcare services is about as good as it gets.

But that country life idyll is not only about the physical environment. It is also about our rural communities and the services they provide to reinforce our secure livability, day-by-day. I think of both the benefits, convenience, and pleasure of patronizing my neighbours, whether shopping for groceries, eating out, or accessing other services including those of Southern Frontenac Community Services. As a one-time Vice-Principal of Health Sciences and Dean of Medicine at Queen's, I can speak to the importance to everybody's good health of both primary care, that provided by family physicians, nurse practitioners, and increasingly others working in teams, and the specialized care referred to above - together what we commonly refer to as our "health care system". But I can speak also of the equally vital contributions of community support services to people's good health, services like those available in our region from Southern Frontenac Community Services - services such as the food bank, respite day care, wholesome frozen meals and hot ones on wheels, drives to appointments, assistance with housing, exercise classes, social events to facilitate interaction with fellow community members, and others. Care and support services are both essential to the good health of all people but especially those whose health is threatened, most often by poverty, age, and social isolation.

Over many years now Southern Frontenac Community Services has operated out of the facilities of what was once Grace United Church in Sydenham. Those facilities, supplemented in recent years by a couple of what were once old school portables, are no longer capable of safely accommodating the services provided. The historic limestone Church must be renovated and expanded to meet the needs the people it serves now and will serve into the future. I have given high priority to my contribution to the community campaign to raise the money needed to support this expansion and renovation of the Grace Centre and ask, indeed urge, you to do the same. Your doing so will enhance significantly the good physical and social health of our community here in the rural Frontenacs.