With just the click of a button, you can get the wheels turning on a new facility for kids with special needs in Chatham-Kent.
Children's Treatment Centre Foundation Executive Director Mike Genge says the organization needs to move forward in building its new facility and needs help with funding from the province to do that.
"We wanted to look at this election and be able to send out a message to all of the candidates in the Chatham-Kent-Leamington area, as well as to our provincial leaders to be able to say to them 'We in rural Ontario need help to get a new facility," he says.
The centre will be located on McNaughton Ave. in Chatham. Construction is planned to start in November 2018 with a target opening date of February 2020.
Genge says it only takes a minute for residents to send off the letter.
"What they do is they go to the website: https://ckclicksforkids.com/... There's a button that says 'Would you like to send a letter out to our candidates?,'" says Genge. 'Then from there they just have to put in their first name, their last name, and their email address and from that, the letter will be sent directly out to the candidate."
Genge says almost 1,200 people have sent letters to candidates and party leaders in Southwestern Ontario through the campaign since it started a week ago.
"We just want people to be able to send the letter out to the candidates and get them to understand that we need a new facility," he says. "We've just run out space and we've run out of compliance as far as accessibility for our kids. We really need to move this forward and we figured this is a good time to do it--make it an election issue."
Genge says he knows the CTC is number one in the queue for funding in the Southwestern Ontario, but he's hoping this campaign will get the wheels turning faster.
"The more people we have to tell the government that we need this new facility, the shorter time it will take for us to get the funding," he says.
