New Brunswick government invests $2.5 million in Bee Me Kidz
From left to right: Bee Me Kids Founding President Missy Bewick, Minister responsible for La Francophonie Glen Savoie, Social Development Minister Dorothy Shephard, Bee Me Kidz child Sadie Adams, Bee Me Kidz Katherine Gregoire, and Superintendent of Anglophone South School District Derek O’Brien pose for a photo. (Avery MacRae/ CTV Atlantic)
Over the next six years Bee Me Kidz, a non-profit organization in Southern New Brunswick, will receive $2.5 million from the provincial government.
Bee Me Kidz offers free educational and parental programs to elementary school aged children, focusing on a number of areas from social and emotional skills, to community connectivity. The goal is to better support vulnerable children and their families to help them achieve success in the labour market.
“This is meaningful in a huge way because it is empowering families to be the best they can be,” says Social Development Minister Dorothy Shephard, who made the announcement on behalf of Training and Labour Minister Trevor Holder. “To want to evolve to do the things they might have dreamed of. If you’re changing lives you know you’re doing the right thing, and that’s what this program does.”
The free weekly programs have been running for the past nine years, with its Saturday program including a parental education component aimed to enhance parent’s support of their children’s social and emotional needs at home.
“We have to foster the family,” says Shephard. “And for me that’s what Bee Me Kidz does. It fosters the family, to support them.”
Bee Me Kids Founding President Missy Bewick never imagined the program would reach this height when she began the organization in 2014.
“Without our amazing team the success of the program would not be what it is today,” says Bewick. “I couldn’t have imagine the community we have created in my wildest dreams.”
The program currently benefits around 1600 children in the Saint John and St. Stephen, N.B., area, with an expansion coming to Sussex, N.B., in September.
For more New Brunswick news visit our dedicated provincial page.
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