One year ago, the Dorie's House Annual General Meeting was a different affair.

Financially, 2020 saw a bit of a shortfall due to lost fundraising opportunities from the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was mostly made up through grant funding and projects like the deal with Swift Current Crisis Services to share office space.

It wasn't too long after that, however, that the Southwest Youth Emergency Shelter learned that they had received what they had long been waiting for, core funding.

The Saskatchewan Health Authority had come through with a financial committment to open Dorie's House's doors, but with a slight alteration to the organization's mandate.

As a result, last week's AGM looked, and felt a bit different. The volunteer board was joined by new staff members, including new Dorie's House Executive Director Rebecca Donnelly and a new House Manager. Together, they've taken on the task of filling out the organization's staffing levels in preparation for a hopeful September soft launch.

It's also taken a lot of extra work off of the plate of Shaun Hanna, the President of Southwest Yes.

"They were able to travel to Wakamow in Moose Jaw and check out Thundercreek Rehabilitation Centre, which is an adult program but it allowed them to see what the sort of day-to-day running of a substance misuse program would look like. And this week they just got back from the Calder Centre in Saskatoon, which is SHA's sort of main treatment centre for youth."

Hanna added that they would be drawing a lot on those models to integrate into their own upcoming programming as an emergency addictions centre, but that a larger focus of the project is to actually build on them; find a way to improve on them.

"Asking the questions like what sort of things would you have done from the beginning that we can now do from the beginning. Our goal is really to create a centre of excellence for the province right here in Swift Current for substance misuse and treatment as well as that emergency shelter."

Hanna believes that there is an advantage to having a program like what is coming up in Swift Current, both for local southwest residents and for the province as a whole.

For the southwest, the youth in need would be coming from a similar context, and in a number of cases be closer to their existing support structure in a way that they wouldn't be if they would need to travel to a larger centre for treatment. The culture shock of putting an already vulnerable 12 -18-year-old with substance misuse issues into an even stranger situation of staying in a larger centre than they might be used to could prove to be a hindrance.

For the province as a whole, however, the microcosm effect could prove valuable. As the solutions that work in a smaller centre can scale up to the larger centres and contribute to the larger whole.

"If you think about a high-risk population in a larger centre like Saskatoon or Regina, if they're able to come to Swift Current it allows them to get out of that context that they might be facing...whatever that might be, and allow them to see that there are options out there. It gives them a kind of a pause or breaks to stabilize and then we can bridge them back into their communities with having built up a better skill set or resources and tools in their utility belt to return to the communities."

Dorie's House is aiming for a planned soft launch sometime in September.