Presentation

Today, Karen Urbanoski from Canadian Insititute for Substance Use Research at UVIC and Umbrella's Team Lead, Evan James presented to over 100 interested individuals about the different understandings of addiction and implications for treatment. This dialogue provided a...

Outreach Team

Check out this photo of Umbrella's awesome outreach team. This group genuinely care about clients, our community and each other. Evan, our Team Lead is in the centre, with the outreach folks around him. Some have specialities like Jake on Saltspring Island and Cait our...

Our favourite photographer

We have a favourite photographer and we want to tell everyone about her! Erin Ruff has been taking our staff, board and dog photos for many years, and captured our last hockey game too. We just updated our staff photos - check them out! She is wonderful to work with an...

Staff Fun

Every Wednesday the team gets together for a staff meeting. We rotate chairs weekly and this week was Conor's turn to facilitate the meeting. Everyone has been so busy and working hard that Conor planned something fun, and it was a hit! We all had to try and guess the ...

Lunch with Angels

Today, Sharlene and Blake joined a lovely group of community members appropriately called "Angels" for lunch and an update. Over the past year, this generous group has been doing a monthly grocery shop with the residents of Cooper and Hudson Houses. The residents are so...

Chamber Business Lunch

Sharlene and Blake, our Housing Manager, attending the Chamber of Commerce business luncheon with CEO of BC Housing, Shayne Ramsay. It is always great to attend these events and meet other people passionate about housing and our community. And a bonus was sitting with G...

Thank you St Aidans Church

There are not enough ways to say thank you! Today St Aidans Church members donated $11, 178 to Umbrella which 100% of this donation will be applied to the downpayment for Foundation House that we are working so hard to secure. The staff and board are incredibly grateful...

Project Connect 2020

Today was Project Connect at Kirk Hall. Louise and Laura were on hand to help with questions, share information and provide support as needed. This event is an annual one, typically in October. This year, the organizers changed it to January and I think the community ap...

Christmas Party 2019

Last night was our annual staff/board Christmas mixer, this year we held it at our new office! This space was perfect for chatting, eating and playing our annual gift stealing game. All in all it was another fun Umbrella event! Nicole and Amy chatting and socializing...

Axe throwing

Tonight for a bit of fun, the Foundation House residents and a few of the housing staff went to Axe and Grind and threw some axes around. The house counsellor Terry is away so we snuck the boys out of the house for some fun instead of their weekly house meeting. We have...