Jacqueline Hoffman (right), the CEO of Prairie Sky Recovery Centre Inc., cuts the 10th anniversary cake with her mother Ardyth Wilson, who is the centre’s founder, at the Recovery Days event held in Leipzig on Aug. 24-25.
Kenneth Brown
of The Crossroads
The Prairie Sky Recovery Centre has been helping people to overcome their addictions for a decade, and an event on the weekend helped to mark the milestone.
Recovery Days was a celebration held over two days on Aug. 24-25 at the centre in the former village of Leipzig. The main day of the celebration was on Aug. 25 when the general public could attend the centre to enjoy tours, food, entertainment and guest speakers.
Jacqueline Hoffman, the CEO of Prairie Sky Recovery Centre Inc., said about 100 people made the trip to Leipzig last Saturday to help the centre celebrate its anniversary. There was a cake that Hoffman, who became CEO in 2016, cut with her mother and founder of the recovery centre, Ardyth Wilson. The centre is known as Ardyth House, so it is named after its founder and it is an impressive, historic structure.
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Ardyth House was built in 1927 and it used to be a boarding school known as the Notre Dame Convent. The 90-year-old building was purchased by Wilson in 2008 and it has gone through $1 million in renovations since then. The centre, formerly known as Leipzig Serenity Retreat, has in excess of 100 clients per year.
Recovery Days featured food and fellowship, live music, a dunk tank, a pie-eating competition, face painting and games for children, and guest speakers. The speakers were from various groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon, Narcotics Anonymous and Residents in Recovery.
The centre had planned to hold campfire meetings on Friday night for clients, but the meetings were held indoors because it was cold and quite windy. Saturday was cloudy at first, but the sun came out and it ended up being a nice day, Hoffman noted.
She said most of the people attending the event were from Saskatoon and people who are local to the area. Most of the attendees were former clients and their families. The CEO said it was a great day for everyone involved.
“We were just so excited that we were able to have people come out and celebrate with us on our 10th anniversary,” Hoffman said, noting that the organizers were happy with the day and the turnout. “We’re just so proud that we were able to make it to that milestone.”
The centre’s staff took turns sitting in the dunk tank, so people had an opportunity to dunk the staff including the CEO. Hoffman recognized that it gave the staff members a chance to dunk the boss. The centre has 18 employees.
Bruin Eberle, a singer-songwriter from North Battleford, performed at the event on Saturday evening. Volunteers helped at the hamburger booth and with the smoked pork chop supper, and the CEO said she wanted to thank everyone who contributed to the event in any way.
Hoffman said the centre and its staff are excited to be a finalist for an ABEX Award, a program through the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce. The centre is a finalist for the Priority Focus Award and she said it is exciting to be a finalist.
Prairie Sky Recovery Centre is the only private recovery centre in Saskatchewan, and the CEO said the ABEX Award would be the biggest honour that the centre could achieve in 2018. The centre also won a Torch Award for business ethics from the Better Business Bureau earlier this year.
“We were just happy that people were able to come out and enjoy the building,” Hoffman added, recognizing that approximately 30 of the more than 100 people there went for tours of the building. “It was a fantastic time.”
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