Valhalla Rec Centre is getting a kitchen

The Community Table Kitchen Project is funded through the Creating Shared Value Fund.

Without a kitchen, a birthday party at the Valhalla Rec Centre shows up in a cooler. Whoever is hosting packs the food at home, drives it over, and reheats what will fit in a microwave.

Heather Isaac knows the routine. She is president of the volunteer board that runs the centre and comes from a family too big for her own house, so the gatherings have overflowed into the rec centre many times over.

Earlier this year the board applied to the Creating Shared Value Fund for the Community Table Kitchen Project, and found out this summer it was one of five organizations in the region to receive funding.

The money puts cabinets, countertops, a fridge, a stove, and a sink into the party room alongside the arena, with the plumbing and wiring to run them. The room has never had a kitchen, and that changes what it can be booked for. Birthday parties, meetings, and small gatherings were the limit, and it can now take a supper booking, a fundraiser, or a community meal.

“Now, if I want to have a family gathering here, we can actually cook dinner here,” Isaac says. “We can just all be here together making the meal, having fun.”

Terri Corbett, the board’s vice-president, says adding the party room brought in rentals and family parties, and the kitchen is the next piece of that.

“This will obviously expand very greatly the kind of profile of what we have to offer for people in the community,” Corbett says.

CSV Midstream Solutions launched the Creating Shared Value Fund in January and pays for it out of a portion of the revenue its Albright gas plant west of Grande Prairie brings in. Traditional sponsorship budgets get reviewed every year and can be cut, while this money is tied to the plant itself and was set up to keep paying out for as long as it runs.

Deciding where the money goes is left to a guiding committee of local residents who know the region and read the applications themselves, on the reasoning that people living around the plant can see where it will do the most good. The Northwestern Alberta Foundation accepts applications, works with the committee, and administers the Fund.

Creating Shared Value is the idea that a company and the place it operates in should both come out ahead from the same work, and it is what the letters in CSV stand for.

The Rec Centre has been a registered society since 1966 and sits in Valhalla Centre, in the County of Grande Prairie. Its ice is natural, so volunteers come down after work to flood it and the season runs on whatever the weather gives them. The school uses the rink, families rent the room, and teenagers are still taking slapshots at midnight.

Isaac lived in the trailer next door to the arena before she was on the board, and she put her name forward for president when the board was running short of directors.

Corbett was born in Valhalla in 1976 and has been there ever since, apart from three years in Calgary. Her family has farmed in the area for three generations, going back to great-grandparents who came out from Norway. She is a nurse in a long-term care centre, and she and her husband keep an acreage with cattle and four kids.

Corbett sees the funding through the lens of a small community that outsiders tend to pass by.

“A lot of people don’t like to slow down through Valhalla. It’s an inconvenience. It often seems like just a spot that people blow through,” she says. “So for a group to take the time to say Valhalla is really important and it does a lot of good things, and to invest in that, it’s just a huge amount of gratitude that we have.”