Palmerston - Days 3 & 4

Last week was our first time this summer in Palmerston. Palmerston is the most westerly of the towns that we are based in this summer and is about an hour from Guelph.

Last Tuesday, we spent a marathon day in all four of the communities where our temporary summer offices will be open. Starting in Arthur and ending the day in Palmerston, we put up posters throughout all four of the towns to advertise our forthcoming presence in these towns. We had an especially good reception in Arthur where all of the businesses with the exception of TD Bank permitted us to put up posters on the High Street before we placed some more in some of the places out of the town centre, including the Arena and Community Centre.

From Arthur, it was on to Mount Forest where after a short stop again at the Arena, we put up posters at our office at 102 Main Street (the Old Post Office and a beautiful old building), the laundrette and then on a number of handily placed notice-boards throughout the town centre. Walking along the Main Street – which doubles as Highway 6 – we noticed an office for Gary Schellenberger, the Conservative MP for Perth-Wellington. We went in and met with his Assistant and provided information about the Legal Clinic and the temporary office that we are opening in Mount Forest for the summer. We then continued to poster throughout the town, including the LCBO, Trellis (former the Community Mental Health Clinic), the Victoria Order of Nurses (VON) office and the Louise Marshall Hospital.

Next, it was back to our old stomping ground of Harriston. The High Street, Arena, LCBO, Library and of course, the Early Years Centre were extremely welcoming and supportive and readily agreed to put up our posters.

Then it was onto Clifford, a small town about 10km northwest of Harriston which lies on the Wellington County boundary. We put up posters here advertising our presence in Harriston in the Post Office and the Library/Medical Centre.

Our final stop of the day was Palmerston. After visiting our office at the Rural Women’s Support Program on King Street, we then went onto Main Street and put up posters at all the usual haunts: the LCBO, Library, Laundrette and the main posterboard in town. Finally, because Help is Close to Home, it was great that Palmerston’s very friendly Home Hardware agreed to house a poster as well.

On Wednesday, we spent most of the day in our office in Palmerston. We were delighted to see that the press release that we sent to the Minto Express found its way onto page 7 of this week’s edition of the paper, just underneath the report of the Minto 4-H Dairy Club’s meeting about the ‘Udder Health’ of cattle. We then came back to Guelph via Moorefield and Drayton, two small communities in the heart of Wellington County. Unfortunately, each of these towns are probably 15-20km away from the nearest Legal Clinic temporary summer office in Palmerston and Arthur respectively but that did not prevent an outstanding response from both towns to our efforts to put up posters advertising the Legal Clinic. Every single place that we visited readily agreed to house our posters.

Tomorrow and Wednesday, we will be in Mount Forest, the place with the cheapest gas in Ontario!