City of Coquitlam awards new funding to Talitha Koum

COQUITLAM—The City of Coquitlam is furthering its support of a non-profit society for drug-addicted and formerly incarcerated women.

The city is providing Talitha Koum with $200,000 in addition to a $600,000 grant given earlier this year to buy a home and offer more housing and programs to women in need.

The funds “will help to complete renovations to accommodate a legal secondary suite as well as to ensure the house meets all health and safety requirements for the women and children who will call it home,” the city said in a press release.

The initial grant of $600,000, which Talitha Koum matched with its own savings, proved “insufficient” to buy and renovate the home due to rising housing prices.

Talitha Koum, founded in 1999, offers housing, 12-step programs, and life skills to women with addictions and criminal records. Before receiving help from the City of Coquitlam, it operated only one home in Coquitlam with nine beds.

Thanks to the city, which pulled the resources out of its Affordable Housing Reserve Fund, the society will open another nine beds.

“It’s great. It will be doubling our capacity,” Sharon De Lalla, executive director, told The B.C. Catholic in September.

“We serve all of B.C. We have women that come from the Island, that come from the Interior. There’s such a need in the community and to be able to offer these many beds is amazing.”

De Lalla hopes the home will be fully operational in the spring of 2018.

Talitha Koum was chosen as the first group to benefit from the AHRF, created in 2015.