Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton gets $100K in donations after funding issues force intakes pause

It goes a long way to demonstrating to us that yes, there are tons of people in our community who support the work that we're doing," the CEO of SACE, told Global News on Monday.

After funding issues forced the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton (SACE) to lay off some staff and suspend intakes on services this month, the non-profit’s CEO says she is heartened that groups in the city have since donated over $100,000 to the organization in its time of need.

“It doesn’t get us out of the hole, but it goes a long way to demonstrating to us that yes, there are tons of people in our community who support the work that we’re doing,” Mary Jane James, the CEO of SACE, told Global News on Monday.

“The more we can demonstrate that need to our community, and most importantly to our government, the better off we’ll be.”

Earlier this month, James said that while operational funding of just over $2 million has been renewed by the provincial government, her organization will lose grant funding on March 31 that it had received from the provincial government a couple of years ago. That funding was given to SACE in 2023 and totalled $1.8 million over two years. It was meant to address a growing waitlist that had some people waiting for 18 months to access services.

On Monday, James was handed a cheque for $85,000. The donation came from seven auto dealerships via the CanadaOne Auto Group. And over the weekend, an event dubbed the Heavy Hockey Showdown took place at the Downtown Community Arena and raised about $28,000 for SACE.

“We’re definitely going to put it towards our clinical team,” James said of the donations. “We already have a waitlist that’s sitting there of three to four months.

“We will reopen our intake process. We just had to catch our breath after last week and figure out the way forward.”

Anastasia Goddard, a marketing manager with CanadaOne Auto Group, told Global News that the way the auto dealerships banded together to help was “pretty incredible.”