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Hospice not eligible for Delta grants

Editor: It is certainly not true, as a recent letter writer asserted, that the Hospice society has in the past been either a private or a faith-based organization.

Editor:

It is certainly not true, as a recent letter writer asserted, that the Hospice society has in the past been either a private or a faith-based organization.

More than a decade ago I was a member of a volunteer committee tasked by Delta council with making recommendations about a new method for allocating council's budget for grants to community organizations. 

There had been at the time an annual global grants budget. A volunteer grants committee would study all the applications and make recommendations to council, which could accept or reject the result.

My committee found that large grants had regularly gone to three organizations while small grants to other groups shifted each year.

The organizations receiving the regular major grants were Deltassist, Boys and Girls Club, and Hospice. Deltassist and Boys and Girls Club were long-time providers of essential services that some municipalities provide directly through staff.

For Hospice to be in that company it must have convinced the decision makers that it was developing an equally important public service.  

It would not have been eligible even to apply if it was a religious organization.

Gail Neff Bell