BONNYVILLE – An in-kind donation from Canadian Natural Resources (CNRL) will create some much-needed space at the Bonnyville and District SPCA in the near future.
Since the Bonnyville SPCA opened, it has housed both its offices and cat house in the same building. However, with feline intake increasing something had to give.
A recent decision by the Town of Bonnyville to allow the non-profit to expand the property's physical footprint sent volunteers on a hunt to utilize that extra space.
“The easiest and quickest solution that we figured would be to get an office trailer, so I started reaching out to my contacts and CNRL got back to us fairly quickly and said, ‘We think we have something for you’,” said Silke Skinner, the treasurer for the Bonnyville and District SPCA.
On May 18, a full-sized office trailer donated by CNRL was hauled and placed in the Bonnyville SPCA yard with the help of S&T Energy Services Ltd. who organized the relocation of the trailer from the CNRL site and covered the cost to move the trailer.
Avalanche Winch & Tractor Services was the company that then picked up and hauled the trailer to its new location.
Kim Foisy, a stakeholder relations advisor with CNRL, explained that the request trickled down from the Wolf Lake Area superintendent. It wasn’t long before Keith Hornseth, the maintenance foreman for thermal operations at Wolf Lake, found an underutilized trailer that fit the bill.
“We were hoping to find something, and we did,” said Foisy. “We live and work in this community and we try to support as many organizations as we can in the community, and the SPCA is an organization that falls right in our four pillars of values we like to help out with.”
While many organizations seek monetary donations, Foisy noted it is always nice when CNRL has the ability to provide support in other ways, such as in-kind donations.
“To be able to give something that is not just a cash value, and to be able to give them something without them having to go and find it themselves in the first place is really important to us,” she said.
Now that the donated trailer is where the Bonnyville SPCA needs it to be, CNRL is carrying out repairs to the structure to ensure it will be in the right condition to be used year-round.
“We didn't want to hand them a problem. We wanted to make sure that it was in the right shape to go,” added Foisy.
Before staff can move their headquarters over to the new building they will also have to wait until the building is tied into municipal lines.
Skinner is now working with the Town to submit applications for building and development permits. As a result, the timeframe of when the SPCA’s reception and offices can be moved remains up in the air.
“In the last two days, we had six calls about people finding kittens. And because the animal shelter is already at capacity, there is a waiting list of people trying to drop off stray cats and kittens,” noted Skinner. “So, the quicker we can move in that office trailer the better.”
The long-term goal is to have visitors head straight to the reception and office building. That way guests will always be accompanied by an SPCA staff member or volunteer when they enter the cat or dog houses.
Skinner added that the Bonnyville SPCA is extremely grateful for the work and the donation provided to them by CNRL, S&T Energy Services and Avalanche Winch & Tractor Services.
“If they go out of their way to do something like that everyone should know about it because this is not a small thing that they've done for us,” said Skinner. “We are just super thankful for what they're doing.”
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