Jason Rioux will travel to Winnipeg to accept The National Trust's Ecclesiastical Insurance Cornerstone Award which celebrates exemplary projects, places and people that contribute to the quality of life and sense of place, and illustrate the viability of heritage buildings and sites for traditional or new uses.
Back in the summer of 2016, Jason and his wife Victoria started the journey of taking on the St. John’s Anglican church building with an unknown destination. It is Jason’s home town and he wanted to work on something that was good for Chapleau. So they did a deal with Anglican diocese of Moosonee to buy the church building, which was one of the last historic buildings left standing in Chapleau but in serious disrepair. The congregation had shrunk to very small numbers such that heating the building and keeping up with the necessary repairs was no longer financially viable.
"It seemed like every year another building was getting knocked down in Chapleau and people weren't trying to repurpose what was there, and some of the character that was in town was getting lost," Jason said.
The building has been transformed into the Chapleau Hub, a community hub to spur and support local entrepreneurs, that now hosts a licensed restaurant in the lower level with a wood fired pizza oven, and shared use on the main floor with yoga lessons, fitness programs, children and youth programming, women’s shelter meetings, weekly movie nights, and most importantly we have kept the church congregation full use on Sundays and special events, so the place of worship has been retained even though now privatized with multiple shared uses.
The building has also been converted to a modern wood pellet boiler system, getting the building off of diesel and now a proud carbon free building, which sources its wood pellets from northern Ontario supporting the local economy.
This has been a journey with lots of stories and lessons learned to share, which Jason will share with the rest of Canada at the conference in Winnipeg this month.
Jason and his wife Victoria are honoured to receive national recognition for the Hub’s successes and would like to thank all the tenants, contractors, volunteers, and people that have touched or had a role to play in the success of the Chapleau Hub coming to be. However, since Jason and Victoria live so far away, they need more help to grow the activities and uses at the Chapleau Hub and manage the building, for the benefit of Chapleau, and encourage anyone interested in getting involved to reach out to Jason.rioux@gmail.com. They also thank Jason's parents Heather and Robert Rioux.
The 2019 National Heritage Awards will be presented on October 18, 2019 at the Millennium Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba during a ceremony held as part of the National Trust’s Annual Conference (in association with the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals).
I extend my most sincere congratulations to Victoria and Jason on winning this national award, as well as their efforts to "save" St. John's Anglican Church which was consecrated in 1907. My email is mj.morris@live.ca