"Gorgeous Gardens and
Great Gifts" High Tea
- A great success for
Telecare Distress Centre

The event included high tea served with refreshments, silent auction, musical entertainment and display tables from various businesses. The event was well attended with more than 120 guests in attendance from various walks of life.

Telecare Distress Centre would like to thank the members of our community, government, business organizations and various associations and groups for their support and participation at the event. Our Platinum sponsors included Brampton Mayor Susan Fennell, Huspen Contracting Ltd and Cook & Company. Our Gold sponsors included Rotary Club of Brampton, Community Environment Alliance, Bohire Inc and Tibollo and Associates. We truly appreciate their generous support to our organization. A Special "Thank You" to our Silver and Bronze sponsors who also helped make this event a big success.

Sandra Conroy, the Board Chair of Telecare Distress Centre who started as a distress line volunteer in this organization, talked about the valued service provided to the community through the distress line program. She thanked the staff, volunteers and the community members for their support towards this organization.

Also, present at the occasion were MPP Dr. Kuldip Kular and MP Gurbax Malhi who spoke about the importance of the distress lines for our multi-lingual and multi-cultural community, a service welcomed by the diverse ethno-specific population living in the Region of Peel.

Telecare Distress Centre has been serving the community with its distress line program since 1973. The centre provides free and confidential listening and emotional support along with crisis and suicide prevention/ intervention on its 24/7 telephone lines.

In order to respond to the growing needs of the diverse community in the Region of Peel, Telecare Distress Centre launched its ROTAG (Reaching Out to all Groups) program in 2005. This program includes crisis intervention and emotional first-aid support in nine other languages besides English, as well as for people with disabilities and the gay/lesbian community.

The service is now offered, by highly trained volunteers, in English, Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish and Portuguese. In the next three years the centre will be launching Mandarin, Arabic, French and Polish crisis support lines.

Presently, the United Way, Region of Peel, Ontario Trillium Foundation, service clubs, small business and private donations provide approximately 60% of our funding. We are still required to raise the remaining 40% of our funding.

If you would like to know more information about this organization or will like to donate on-line to this great cause, please visit www.telecaredistresscentre.org. Our fundraising campaign closes on May 30th 2008.