Every year for the last 26 years, Tree Canada has been providing grants for local Home Hardware stores with funding to provide trees for their communities.
Osoyoos Home Hardware owner Frances Sologuk has consistently applied for this grant. This year, Osoyoos Home Hardware received $2,900 from Tree Canada which they decided to donate to the Osoyoos & District Museum and Archives for their new outdoor heritage space.
Sologuk then worked with Sandhu Greenhouses to get plants and trees which are now donated to the museum.
“Just to show you how long I’d been in business, I think years ago, my grant was $200. And it is now $2,900,” joked Sologuk, who added “that is really not me; that is Tree Canada and Home Hardware head office combined.”
“When [the grant] came up again, this year, we thought of the museum right away, because the urban Heritage Park is going to be a big part of our community,” said Sologuk. “And the fact that it’s really going to be a community park; in that we can go to the park if we want to have a staff meeting there. If we want to have any heritage events, we can also plan on doing that.”
The heritage park is currently the concrete lot right next to the new museum location. Kara Burton, executive director at the museum, stated that the lot itself is about 30.5 metres in length and will become an outside space used for a range of things.
“It’ll be an event space for the museum, for education for our school groups, it’ll be a meeting place that local community groups can use or for other local events, it will be used as a learning centre as well – sort of an extension of the museum but on the agricultural history of the area.The possibilities are endless as far as I’m concerned,” said Burton.
The plan is to make the first 7.6 metres of the lot into an open park space with some benches and plantings that will be open to the public. The rest will be the heritage park as planned.
The trees and plants donated to the museum by Home Hardware will be in the open park area. However, this project will take place closer to spring 2022, according to Burton.
“We have applied for some major funding as we need approximately $200,000 because we have to take all the concrete out, and we have to develop quite a bit of that,” explained Burton. “We have applied for some other grants for that so we’re hoping that we’ll get some more funding to put towards it.”
