Central Alberta FASD Network holds its first open house in their new 5000 square foot office space, which it moved to to accommodate its growing team. (rdnewsNOW/Ashley Lavallee-Koenig)

By Ashley Lavallee-Koenig

764 CLIENTS SERVED

FASD Network showcases a year of growth in first open house

Jul 18, 2024 | 12:36 PM

The Central Alberta FASD Network welcomed three new board members and celebrated a year of service growth at its Annual General Meeting and first open house in its one-year-old office space.

The organization welcomed Barb Sluggett as a director, Cpl. Amber Prosser as a director, and Katherine Rauch as secretary to the board during the July 17 event.

The non-profit offers an array of services for people diagnosed with FASD and their caregivers. It offers diagnosis and assessments to anyone over the age of seven, community outreach, as well as education and support for life skills.

It also provides training and education to professional organizations and schools and works directly with the RCMP and the Crown to divert individuals with FASD to their corrections programs rather than incarcerating them.

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder “is a brain and body-based disorder for people who have been impacted by prenatal alcohol exposure. It is a lifelong disability,” explained executive director Julie Nanson-Ashton. “Most people with FASD have some kind of challenges, especially if they’re not supported, with memory, attention span, physical health, getting through school, finding a job, all those things. But what we do know is that early on support through our agency results in less adverse outcomes.”

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This year, they have helped 764 clients, a number that has been trending upwards every year. When Nanson-Ashton became executive director in 2018, the organization had three employees and served about 250 clients. She and the board of directors then turned their efforts to applying strategically for government grants and now, they have 30 employees and can help hundreds more clients.

“We also now are a charity, and our fundraising has just started and 100 per cent of the proceeds, minus the small cost of fundraising, will go towards assessment diagnosis, and then we are looking at expanding into housing,” she said.

Each individual assessment costs about $4500-$5000, a cost completely covered by the organization as they provide the service for free. They completed 18 diagnoses in 2018, and 64 this year.

“That medical diagnosis opens the doors for AISH, PDD, and housing options. Being supported reduces the risk of them getting involved in criminal activity, or more mental health issues, or addictions and we can prove that; we have proven it. Any person that is supported by us and we’re able to get them assessed or diagnosed, it changes their lives.”

FASD-dedicated supportive housing is a new initiative of the charity and is one of its strategic goals for 2024-27. Nanson-Ashton explained that securing housing can be difficult for anyone, let alone for someone with a disability who is met with stigma and struggles with skills like budgeting.

“It’s a few years down the road, but we’re going to look at attempting to purchase or rent at least one home in the next three years to see how that looks. We have a model in place, we’ve done all the research. That’s where the fundraising comes in,” she said.

They are also launching a Life Skills program in September with assistance from a grant they received from the City of Red Deer. She said their six-week trial run was a huge success and helped 12 graduates with skills like budgeting and paying bills, cooking and grocery shopping, and more.

“Life skills are one of the things that stop people from falling through the cracks,” she added.

The Government of Alberta says that four per cent of Canadians, about 174,000 Albertans, have FASD. This makes it more prevalent than cerebral palsy, autism, and Down syndrome combined.

“Those three things are really well supported; people feel really good about supporting them. When it comes to FASD, we find there’s a lot of stigma surrounding that, which isn’t helpful because it doesn’t impact on the adverse outcomes,” she said. “The more we can support individuals with FASD, the less we’re worrying about community safety, the less we’re worrying about adverse outcomes like mental health, addictions, and homelessness.”

Nanson-Ashton added that one-in-three incarcerated people have FASD. For the first time during the Network’s expansion of its restorative justice programs it has worked with the Red Deer Remand Centre, Bowden, and Drumheller institutions directly to assess and diagnose.

Removing stigma is another large component of the organization’s goals. The Government of Alberta says that 60 per cent of pregnancies are unplanned, and a report from 2017 found that 77 per cent of women reported consuming alcohol in the previous year. There is no safe amount of alcohol to consume during pregnancy, but women experiencing an unplanned pregnancy may not be aware of their condition until weeks or months into the process.

“Most of the time it just happens. Even those women who know they’re pregnant and continue to use alcohol, they’re not doing it because they want to harm their child: they’re doing it because they’re in circumstances that are really, really awful. And we support those women,” said Nanson-Ashton. “Most often we support women to the point where they do stop using alcohol, regardless of where they’re at in their pregnancy, but you can imagine how badly a woman feels.”

Although the non-profit has seen tremendous growth in the last six years and has had success in applying for multiple government grants, she emphasized there are only so many to go around and in order to continue to increase the number of people they serve, they will need to increase the income made from fundraising.

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