Rural Frontenac Community Services In The 21st Century

Jeff Green | Jun 05, 2025

Rural Frontenac Community Services (RFCS) will celebrate its 50th anniversary this Saturday, at open houses starting at 11am at the Child Centre off Road 38, at the adult services building 'the mother ship' on Garrett Street, as well as at the Sharbot Lake Hall, next door.

Festivities include the open houses, as well as the dedication of the playground at the child centre, in the names of the late Keith Conboy and Audrey Tarasick, at 1pm.. Fittingly, the dedication is honouring two key elements of the agencies' long-term success, staff and volunteers. Keith Conboy was a volunteer board member with RFCS for decades, and Audrey Tarasick was the founding Director of the Child Centre, which opened in 1990.

To mark the anniversary, the Frontenac News, which shares its origins with RFCS (formerly NFCS or Northern Frontenac Community Services), has published articles on each of the first three decades of the agency's history. This final article in the series looks at the 25 years since the turn of the millennium, in 2000.

As Linda Rush, the Director of Adult Services for NFCS at the time, pointed out, selling the Frontenac News in June of 2000, to David Brison and Sara Carpenter, benefited NFCS in two ways. The paper was an expense as it never brought enough revenue to cover costs, and it drained energy from the core goal of providing community and social services from the 'cradle to the grave' in the still newly created townships of North and Central Frontenac (and parts of South Frontenac).

(As an aside, the changeover to private sector ownership also proved beneficial to the newspaper, which has survived in spite of the challenges faced by community newspapers everywhere in recent years.)

Part of the adaptation to new realities came in the form of a minor name change. North Frontenac Community Services was a suitable name when the agency served the 8 northern townships in Frontenac County until 1998, when North, Central and South Frontenac came into existence. Northern Frontenac Community Services, keeping the NFCS acronym, became the new name.

Susan Leslie became the Director of Children's Services in 1998, when Audrey Tarasick retired. She had been involved in the very beginning of children's services in the late 1970s, as a young mother who helped set up the first informal playgroups for parents and children in the area. This initiative led to NFCS taking on Children's Services, and eventually building the Child Centre.

Leslie remained as Director of Children's Services until 2010, working with Linda Rush and eventually, Scott Black, on the adult side.

During that time, NFCS achieved a stability and maturity that had been elusive in the tumultuous 1990s.

On the Adult Services side, a basket of services for seniors under Community Support Services (CSS), has been funded by the Ministry of Health throughout that time. These services, all aimed at keeping seniors happy and healthy in the community, and lessening the burden on the overstretched long term care system, have include Meals on Wheels, the Adult Day Program for the frail elderly, congregate diners (monthly community meals for seniors), footcare services, friendly visiting, and more.

A family counselor, funded by the United Way, is another core service.

On the Children's Services side, keeping the daycare solvent was a challenge in the early 2000s because of fluctuating demographics, and being connected to the Child Centre helped with facility costs, as did a supportive Children's Services department in the City of Kingston, which provided subsidies for families in need.

“We became the Early Years Centre with provincial funding at that time,” Leslie recalled in a phone interview, and we were already running playgroups everywhere from Verona to Cloyne, as we had for a long time. The Early Years funding came with its own conditions, every few years the province changes what they call the program.”

A trillium grant funded a study into community needs in the region during that decade, and transportation was identified as the number one issue. NFCS started up Rural Routes, a program using volunteer drivers, paid a mileage fee, to bring people to necessary services. That program has become Frontenac Transportation Services (FTS), using base funding from Frontenac County to cover administrative costs, to match drivers with people who need drives.

FTS continues to this day. It is most active in Central and North Frontenac, but is also available in South Frontenac, which is also served by the Southern Frontenac Community Services transportation service.

Both buildings also have provided space and support for outside agencies providing a range of services to the community, include Legal Aide, Ontario Works, the Maltby Centre, Family and Children’s Services, and employment services.

After Scott Black resigned from Adult Services in late 2009, Susan Leslie agreed to take on the role of Executive Director of the entire agency for six months, as she was planning to retire in April of 2010. After she retired, NFCS hired Don Amos as Executive Director, the first person to take on that central role since the Harris government cut funding to the agency in 1995.

Amos consolidated the agency over the next five years, and continued stable funding from a number of sources, along with a relationship with affiliated agencies. This is a feature that remains in place until now.

In 2015, the current executive director, Louise Moody, came on after Don Amos left to take on the ED role, at the Seniors Centre in Kingston.

In 2016 the Ontario government changed hands, and with that came a change in the Early Years Program.

The program was ending, throwing a number of NFCS employees into flux, and a competitive process for the new EarlyON program was set out by the government of Ontario. In order to apply for funding, NFCS had to commit to serving families throughout Frontenac County. This reality is a major reason for a name change for the agency. After an internal process, the name Rural Frontenac Community Services was settled on, and RFCS was selected as the host agency for the EarlyON program, which has a base in Sydenham, as well as in Sharbot Lake.

“EarlyON has a different set of rules than the Early Years program. It is more focused on children than families, and it had its growing pains, but we have found a way to make it work in the communities that we serve,” said Moody.

EarlyON is currently available in Perth Road, Sydenham, Harrowsmith, Godfrey, Verona, Sharbot Lake, Mountain Grove, Arden, and Plevna.

Another service area that was originally initiated in 2007, and was promoted under Don Amos, is the youth program. The program has grown over the years, and is more active than ever, and according to Louise Moody, much of the credit for that should go to the program coordinator Sara McCullough.

For Moody, one of the key elements for RFCS currently, is a staff complement that is mostly made up of people who live either in, or close to the communities that the agency serves.

In addition to staff efforts over the years, RFCS has always been a volunteer-driven organisation. Volunteers deliver Meals on Wheels, power Frontenac Transportation Service, fill out tax forms for seniors through the Income Tax Program, and do much more.

They also fill out the Board of Directors, a job that can be easy when the agency has a stable funding base, but much more complicated at other times. In particular, the roles of board chair and Treasurer.

The Board Chair embodies the community support for RFCS that all funders need to see, in order to ensure that the money being sent to Sharbot Lake is translating into service, for people who need it.

And for an agency that taps into dozens of funding pots, all with different rules, all the while following accounting practices required of a not-for-profit charitable corporation, the expertise provided by a treasurer is essential not only for the comfort of the other board members, but for the staff and clients of the agency as well.

The open houses this weekend provide an opportunity to relive the stories, and see the people who have worked together in the community building exercise that has been Rural Frontenac Community Services since its beginnings in 1971 and its formal incorporation in 1975.