For you who don't know me, my name is Emily Dimitru. I am the community outreach director here. And Your last name? Dimitru. My last name is Dimitru. Yeah. I got to marry that man over there, so pretty exciting. And, yeah, before we dig into the word, which we have a lot of it today, we're going to first just talk about the map on the wall there. So, you guys have probably all seen it.

Maybe this is your first time here and you're like, oh, that's a pretty hip church. They got a map on the wall. Yeah. So, it is the map of Fort Garry. It's just a section there. We have three churches in our neighborhood that we partner with, well, two actually. So, we have, hey, Abby, do you wanna point to Anchor Point? So, we got Anchor Point right there, so that's us. We got Church Of The Rock.

And then we have Grand Memorial a little bit further down. I don't want you guys to see that map and think that that is exactly the right coordinates or anything. There's a little bit of creativity. Artistic flair. Artistic flair. Thank you. But, so that is the community that I have the joy of getting to know and walking alongside and ministering to. So, yeah, I would like to just share with you guys a little bit about Fort Gary Collective, which is a charity that we have been able to start.

I wanna share the heart behind it and kinda, you guys have probably heard Fort Garry Collective and you're like, oh, that sounds cool. Like, what's actually going on? Fair enough. What what's going on? Let me share with you. So we wanna pray for our community. That's the first thing. Before anything else, we don't wanna build our own kingdom. We wanna build God's kingdom. And so, where the streets are, the green streets there, we just wanna pray for those family members, for those community.

I know Connor has amazing stories of, like, walking down the streets and praying for them, and then a year later, those houses that he was praying for, those kids come to youth, and they had no connection to the church beforehand. And so God God works. God works, and we want to invite him to working in our community. So if you guys are thinking like, hey, Fort Gary Collective, cool charity, I would like to volunteer. I invite you all to first join me in praying for the community and just, learning to love our neighbour as ourselves. And so that's what that map is. It's just a reminder. But, what Fort Garry Collective does, I kind of discovered this a couple months ago, is we advocate for people in need.

So anyone who comes in, anyone who emails, anyone that says, like, hey, I have a need, we do our best to either point them in the right direction or help them as best as we can. So we help with resumes, we help with finding jobs, we help with housing, with food, anything that we can really help with. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel, and we're not trying to take away from all the resources around here. We actually want to partner with them and come together. So it's just a big and it's not like a resource center. We're just, like, you know, the go in between that and just advocating for a lot of individuals. And something that Donovan has said a lot, we wanna show extraordinary care to the community by being in proximity with them. I wanna also give you guys, we've talked about the old police station just down Pembina there, 1350.

I kinda wanna give you guys an update what's going on there because we've had pictures up, we've talked about it, but, I wanna give you guys the nitty gritty of what's going on. So, right now, we do not own the police station. Will we ever? I hope so. Maybe for a dollar we'll get it. That's our prayer. But we want it to be a center where, yeah, like I just said, individuals are able to come and there's gonna be a lot of different, organizations that kinda run out of there and all work together. Right now, the police station is part of the housing accelerator fund. It's what the Manitoba government is trying to do to get more low income affordable housing for individuals, which is a great initiative, but it sometimes makes it a little bit difficult for a church, for charities, to be able to then purchase or attain that property.

And so I've been learning a lot about different, like, government bylaws and all these things, things that I don't understand, all this jargon that is way beyond me. But, my my dear friend Nancy and I, we went to a bunch of different, government buildings a couple weeks ago to go ask questions and just to talk because I I just wanted to get down to it. I actually wanted to talk to an individual instead of emailing and just leaving voicemails. So we go to three different buildings and every time they send me to the next one, and then they send me to the next one, and then they send me to the next one. And at the end of the day, all I got was the same email that I've already been emailing So, it's it's kind of hard to to see where we can go from here But, and that individual that I email Pray for him I don't think he likes me very much. He never answers my phone calls. So, but, so that that's what we're working on right now. So, there's not much headway.