Dear Friends,

There are children in our community who wake each morning carrying more than their share. They carry the weight of absent parents, of cupboards gone bare, of streets that don’t feel safe. They carry questions about their worth, their place, their future.

And yet—they carry light too. In their drawings, their music, their questions, their laughter, there is an enduring brilliance. There is beauty. There is so much more than the world has made room for.

The New Dawn Youth and Family Centre is a collective effort to reflect and amplify that light.

It is a place built on the belief that every child is gifted, and that our job as a community is not to fix them—but to see them, to know them, to love them. It is a place where no child will be made to feel small for being poor, isolated, different, afraid, behind.

Here, love is not abstract. It’s found in open doors that never slam shut, warm suppers that fill belly and soul, and creative expression that stains fingers with paint and possibility.

For generations, Glace Bay has lived with the long echo of economic collapse—of mines closed, families fractured, addiction rising in the cracks. Too many of our young people have come of age surrounded by the message that they don’t matter.

At New Dawn, we’ve never waited for permission to build a better future. New Dawn has always believed that community is built through courage, care, honesty, and action. We have built housing, cared for our elderly, nurtured the arts, seeded conversations and gardens, made room. This Youth and Family Centre is the next chapter.

And we cannot do it alone.

We are asking you—our neighbours, our partners, our kindred dreamers—to stand with us. To believe, as we do, that there is no such thing as a lost cause. That love, when organized and made visible and resolute, can change everything.

Help build this place. Not just with bricks, but with tenderness. With the kind of fierce love that says to a child: you matter, you are home. Will you stand with the young people of Glace Bay as they build something beautiful, something truly their own?

With gratitude,