North Frontenac Community Service – Growth in the 1980's

Jeff Green | Mar 13, 2025

Rural Frontenac Community Services, which was originally called NFCS (an acronym for North Frontenac Community Services), is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year, with an event planned for late June.

To mark the anniversary, the Frontenac News, which was founded in 1971 by the same group that eventually became North Frontenac Community Services (NFCS) is publishing articles about each decade of the agency's existence.

By 1980, NFCS was pretty well established, with funding from both levels of government to cover its occupancy and operating costs, at the former manse of St. Andrew's Anglican Church in Sharbot Lake. Its mandate was to provide services and foster community and economic development for residents of the 8 northern townships in Frontenac County.

The townships included the 4 that were eventually amalgamated to form Central Frontenac (Hinchinbrooke, Oso, Olden, and Kennebec), the 3 that formed North Frontenac (Barrie, Clarendon-Miller, and Palmerston) and Bedford Township, which eventually became part of South Frontenac.

Brad Flear started working at NFCS in 1978, at the very end of what he calls “the startup phase” of the organisation, and the beginning of what he calls “the growth phase”. He was hired as an employment counsellor but spent most of his 17-year career with the agency as family counsellor.

“I remember that the first day I was working at the agency, in September of 1978, was the day that our first Executive Director, Wayne Robinson, announced that he was leaving to go into private business,” he said, in a phone interview.

“The agency was very lively in the 1980s. If someone came forward and said it was a good idea to do something, and others agreed, we just went ahead and did it. It doesn’t work that way, in the social services sphere, any more,” he said.

Part of the advantage NFCS had in those years was the fact that it had ongoing funding from the provincial government to pay occupancy costs, and for an administrative staff. That all changed in the mid-1990s, but in the 80s and early 90s, a series of initiatives and ongoing programs came out of NFCS headquarters, the ‘mother ship at the top of the hill’ behind the community hall and Anglican Church in Sharbot Lake.

The first legal officer was hired at that time, a program that was eventually spun off into its own agency, Rural Legal Services, which was based in Sharbot Lake for over 20 years.

To illustrate how free wheeling the agency was at that time, Flear recalled that the second legal officer, Bob Lovelace, approached then Executive Director Larry Leafloor about providing support for an Ardoch resident, Harold Perry. Perry was in a legal battle with a harvesting company over a patch of wild rice that his family had cultivated for over 50 years.

“Larry Leafloor just told him to go ahead and spend as much time as he needed to on the rice, an event that became known as the ‘Rice Wars’. Bob worked on that for a few months, successfully in the end. But that is not something a legal officer would be able to do now.”

There was a printing business that had been set up in the basement of the church in 1980, that ran for several years as a private business, and NFCS interest in economic development eventually resulted in spinning off its economic development office into a separate agency, the Highway 7 CDC (Community Development Corporation) that was active until the new millennium.

It was not always smooth sailing, however.

“There were conflicts between people over different visions of where the agency should be headed, but it was a very dynamic time,” said Flear.

In 1985 Mike Procter was hired as an Adult Protective Services Worker (APSW), his role was to be an advocate and supporter for developmentally disabled adults in the community. Even though the agency that would eventually be renamed Community Living, North Frontenac was already up and running in Sharbot Lake, providing services for many of the same clients as Mike Procter worked on behalf of, his role was different.

“We did not work against each other, but they have a different role, and it was always helpful for me to be connected to an independent advocate,” he said.

Mike Procter’s time at NFCS, lasted over 35 years. Procter said that when he first came to Sharbot Lake from Renfrew, to take on the APSW role, he told his wife Wendy that they “would stay in Sharbot lake for two or three years and then head off to someplace that was more civilised, but then we fell in love with the community and raised a family here.”

He also took on other extra roles at NFCS over the years.

One of those roles came about as the result of another major effort at NFCS that was spearheaded by a group of local mothers, which started at the tail end of 1979.

Susan Leslie put up a sign in the local grocery store in the fall of 1979, seeking other parents of young children to get together with their children. This informal effort led to playgroups in different communities within the 8 township NFCS catchment area, and the first playgroup staff member, Linda Chappel, was hired in 1983.

With provincial funding, a playgroup van was purchased in 1985 to take the program to all the communities, and a toy lending library was next. By the mid-1980s, NFCS had a Children’s Services wing, with Audrey Tarasick as its coordinator.

Then, in 1988, funding became available to build a Child Centre to incorporate all of the family centred children’s services programs the agency was running, in Sharbot Lake and in halls and churches around the region.

The Child Centre would also be able to house a licensed daycare centre. When the funding came through, Mike Procter took on the role of general contractor for the construction project, in addition to his APSW role.

He worked with the children’s services department and an architect to build the Child Centre on land that was purchased on Road 38 across from the Village Woods subdivision in the north part of Sharbot Lake.

The Child Centre opened in 1990, with a daycare centre on the bottom floor, opening up to a playground for the children, and offices and program space upstairs. The Children’s Services wing of the agency, which also runs the EarlyOn program for all of Frontenac County, affiliated children’s services, as well as Frontenac Transportation Services and the Executive Director of what is now RFCS (Rural Frontenac Community Services) are all run out of the Child Centre.

Back at the Adult building, in 1986 Joyce Lewis started working as typist for the North Frontenac News, which operated out of that building until after it was sold into private ownership in 2000.

“I was also working 5 nights a week at the hotel at the time,” she recalls, which she did for another couple of years. In 1988 she started as a receptionist in what is now called the adult building, and she has been the face, and phone voice, of RFCS (NFCS) for community members in need of a wide range of services, ever since.

“There were a lot more people working directly for the agency back in the late 1980s,” she recalls, “we had an employment counsellor, a community development worker, and more.”

That all changed in the 90s.”

“We always had a large corps of volunteers, and we were in a stable state of growth into the 1990s, when things became more challenging,” she said.

Lewis is still with RFCS, through some difficult times as we will see in future articles. And the agency houses affiliated services, such as Ontario Works, ODSP, in addition to their own services for seniors and families, such as the annual tax service and community support services, they remain there to help, when people need help.

 “That’s what keeps me coming to work after 39 years,” said Lewis.