Space to Bloom

ABC Head Start Society and Terra Centre are a perfect pair. The two Edmonton charitable organizations both work to support families — ABC by providing early childhood learning for children with speech, behaviour or developmental challenges, and Terra by helping young parents become stronger, healthier supports for their children. But before December 2024, the two organizations had never formally worked together. Only when crisis struck, born of a sudden loss of classroom space, did the two collaborate.

The story begins with ABC Head Start. The forty-year-old organization is dedicated to ensuring all children have equal access and opportunity when it comes to education. The organization recognizes that supporting childhood development also means supporting parents who might be struggling with vulnerabilities like housing or food insecurity. With that in mind, the organization offers what CEO Erin Gobolos describes as “wraparound care” — an approach that provides education to students in classroom settings while also connecting parents with resources that allow them to create a more secure environment for them and their children. To maintain this level of care, the organization depends on a network of staff, including teachers, education assistants, speech pathologists, social workers, administrators and volunteers. It also depends on space.

ABC operates several sites around the city, including classrooms and active spaces, where children can learn, play and just be kids. But in September 2024, Gobolos got a series of phone calls informing her that ABC’s leases on some classrooms were going to be terminated at the end of the academic year. The result: 230 of the children in ABC’s programming would not have classroom space in September 2025. “We thought, ‘Okay, we’ll just take it in stride. We’ll make some phone calls like we always do,’” says Gobolos. “Then it became November, and we had gotten nowhere.” Faced with the prospect of having to say goodbye to so many of the kids in their program — and as a result, many of their staff — ABC launched a PR campaign and reached out to everyone they could think of, including Beth Hunter, ABC’s contact at the City of Edmonton’s Family and Community Support Services Program. Hunter connected Gobolos with Karen Mottershead, the Executive Director of Terra Centre. Terra had recently completed renovations on a new building the organization purchased in Grovenor and had space to share.

Terra was one of a few organizations that helped ABC in their moment of crisis. That support allowed the organization to continue supporting the families who engage with their programs. It also allowed for a kind of synergy, as Mottershead calls it, between the two organizations — meaning the Terra community could access more services in one place. “It’s been wonderful to have little people coming into our building with laughter and joy,” says Mottershead.

“It’s really helped our organization feel the success of having a community building.”

The spaces Terra and other organizations offered ABC were a lifeline it desperately needed, and thanks to that support it was able to replace all of the classroom spaces it had lost. The ordeal also drew renewed attention to the necessity of space — both for the families the two organizations serve and for the organizations themselves. “Permanent space is a real luxury for a nonprofit,” says Mottershead. Terra purchased its Grovenor building after years spent in a small building downtown where it was easy for community members to feel isolated or stigmatized. In imagining the new space, Mottershead says Terra’s goal was “to create a community building and bring in a variety of different people, organizations and services so that our young parents could access those services and feel like they’re in community.” Edmonton Community Foundation (ECF) played an important role in setting up the Grovenor space for success through $15,000 in funding to create the family playroom, which is used by ABC.

Today, ABC Head Start has three stable spaces. This is also thanks in part to funding from ECF which supported the Northgate Centre location that opened in September 2025 with an $80,000 Community Grant. Together, the large custom-built learning facilities house seven classrooms in total. ABC Head Start and Terra Centre both recognize that vulnerabilities like housing and food insecurity can have a negative impact on childhood education and development. They exist to help support families in part because of the direct relationship between early childhood development and outcomes later in life. “There’s so much research on it,” says Gobolos. “Zero to six are the most fundamental, important years of life.”

Allan Undheim, Vice President of Community Impact for ECF, agrees. Citing the Early Childhood Mapping initiative (ECMap), a collaborative research project supported by Alberta Education, Undheim notes that in 2013, “more than 50 per cent of children entering kindergarten were behind on one or more of the indicators in the Early Development Instrument.” Given how COVID-19 impacted learning, he says we can only assume these numbers have increased. For Undheim and ECF, championing ABC’s focus on early childhood development (ECD) will have a lasting impact on the community. ECF has identified ECD as a priority area because supporting children in their earliest years helps address root causes of many interconnected social challenges later in life — including barriers related to education, employment and mental health. ABC and Terra’s work “supports families as a whole and further contributes to each child’s developmental outcomes and promotes school readiness,” he says.

“The case for investing in the early years is clear.”

It’s the reason ECF is committed to supporting organizations like ABC and Terra. When organizations like this can thrive — with stable space and the resources to provide comprehensive wraparound care — families and communities thrive. It’s a kind of support that has a palpable, lasting impact.

This story comes from the Fall 2025 Edition of Thrive Magazine.

Read the full issue.