A HOME AWAY FROM HOME

For Cameron Wilson, the Ottawa Rotary Home  has become a second home. Wilson, 20, has cerebral palsy; he’s also blind, developmentally delayed, and uses a wheelchair.

He first stayed at the home when he was four years old. His mother, Joan, cheerfully describes her daily routine: cutting up his food, changing his diapers, and checking on him in the middle of the night – except during his visits to the Ottawa Rotary Home.

Rotarians in Ottawa opened the home in 1982 – when the concept of respite care was new – to provide overnight relief to families whose children have severe physical disabilities or other complex medical conditions. “You have to look after the caregivers,” says Patricia Boomer, a member of the Rotary Club of Ottawa and past chair of the home’s board of directors. “They need a break sometimes. They need support. It doesn’t mean they want to give up their child.”

Joan and her husband use the respite time to go on vacation with their two daughters, attend the girls’ soccer tournaments and piano recitals, and deal with family emergencies. Last year, Joan hurt her back while moving her 160-pound son, and again, they turned to the Ottawa Rotary Home for support while she recovered.

She credits the home with providing a sense of balance between Cameron’s needs and the rest of the family’s. “If it hadn’t been for Ottawa Rotary Home, I don’t know how healthy our family would be,” she says. “The home has alleviated an incredible amount of stress in our lives and for other families as well.”

Since 1922, the Ottawa club has focused on helping children with disabilities, supporting a local summer camp and Easter Seals over the years.  

The home opened with 8 beds, later expanding to 12 and quickly becoming a model for respite care. “For years, people have come to us and asked, ‘How do you do this, how do you do that, how does it work?’” Boomer says.

In 2007, the Ottawa Rotary Home Foundation launched a capital campaign to build a larger facility. Over 18 months, it raised $2.3 million (surpassing its goal of $2 million) from 11 Rotary clubs in eastern Ontario, individual Rotarians, families who use the home, and other donors.

With additional funding from several major donors and the government, along with a land donation of 5 acres by a Rotarian, the $6.5 million project opened in February 2009. The original home also was renovated for adult residential care, for a total of 29 beds serving more than 200 families.

The new 18,000-square-foot building offers plenty of space and state-of-the-art features, such as a Snoezelen multisensory room, which uses combinations of gently stimulating colour, light, sound, shape, and texture to enhance therapy, learning, and relaxation.

In 2008, the facility received a United Way Community Builder Award and the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce Not-for-Profit Organization of the Year Award.