Staff Post by Erin Henriksen Ireland, Bowness Club Program Manager

The Bowness Club is in an old building. I remember being in high school in the late 90’s when it was called Pin and Cue… it was a pool hall with a subway inside. When that closed, Wood’s Homes took it over for a few years before Boys and Girls Club turned it into the Bowness Club. Now as Trellis, we decided it was well overdue for a makeover.

The Club was in desperate need of new paint, from classrooms to offices spaces, bathrooms to main spaces and the gymnasium to the multi-purpose room. Chipped, flaking and peeling, our walls showed extensive wear and tear after years of heavy use. On top of that, medical-grade cleaning products in response to pandemic protocols had stained the walls and discoloured the existing paint.

We needed a high-durability paint product that would be able to last through extensive community use and strong cleaning products. However, that would also mean a higher price point for each can of primer and paint.

Help from the the community

As a non-profit, finding the funds to do big overhauls is tough. So, when a grant from the Kinsmen Club of Calgary (KCC) Major Projects Program became available, we knew this was a perfect fit for the Club. The KCC supports community-oriented non-profit organizations in their ability to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow by investing in the lives of people young and old — to live in strong, caring and healthy communities.

We applied and got approved for $20,000! We had big dreams with what we could do with that money, replace the floors, open up the office space, install basketball nets in the gym. But at the end of the day, the most bang for our buck was going to be painting — 7,000 square feet worth of painting.

As the quotes came in, we realized we still were about $12,000 short of our goal to have the entire Club painted. We started to think about what rooms were not too bad and what we could skip out on. Then we came across The Urban Painter.

The Urban Painter created the Paint for Good Project, which selects a few non-profits each year and donates $5,000 worth of either products or labor to upgrade their spaces. When I reached out to them, I thought we might still have to cut out the bathrooms or the offices. But after seeing the space, they told me they wanted to make it work because the Bowness Club was worth it and our kids deserved this. I thought I was dreaming!

For our next steps, we worked with an interior designer who helped us choose colors that were calming and fun to make our space welcoming for kids, adults, youth, everyone.

The Urban Painter team worked around the clock over the holidays to ensure that the space was ready for families when they got back from the break. Though there were a few hiccups along the way (like needing WAY more patchwork than initially thought), all in all we ended up with a beautifully painted space that the staff, kids and families all love!

Prior to all of this, one of our kids in the after-school program was consistently drawing and writing on the walls. One day, our staff was helping her wash off the writing and asked her if she needed to worry about her writing on the walls once the Club got painted. She replied, “Nope, I just do it now because it’s so ugly in here.”

When she got back from the break and saw the new painting she said, “There’s no way I’m writing on these walls, it looks too good!”