Through the doors of the modest house came women seeking legal aid, women who had been battered, women who were homeless or needing rides out of town to where a safe abortion could be had. Now those doors are locked. The Cranbrook Women's Resource Centre was forced to close down on March 10 after serving as a hub for help in the East Kootenay region for 36 years.

The people running the place say they had no choice but to call it quits, succumbing to the pressures of patchwork, inadequate funding.

Now more than 300 women who used the drop-in centre's services every month are out of luck, said Vicky Dalton, the centre's co-coordinator, who was named a "Woman of the Year" in Cranbrook just days before her job abruptly ended.

"We offer support, and a listening ear. We meet women who are emotionally and physically bruised and battered and women who are dealing with illness, mental illness and addictions." As if the centre were still there, doing its work, Dalton speaks in the present tense.

But the doors are in fact locked, and the impact is already felt. "These kinds of losses have a real impact on the community," Cranbrook Mayor Scot Manjak told The Tyee. "The women who relied on these services don't really have a local alternative."

One woman who had used the Resource Centre wrote to Dalton: "The Cranbrook Women's Centre has enhanced my life. They fed me enough to gain weight which gave strength to find employment and had clothes for me too. The counseling was superb and I could not ask for a warmer, more sincere and loving place to get my life back on track. Now I am able to be a volunteer and give some back. How distressing it is that they have to close. Women locked out -- again! How pitiful."

'Heartbreaking' decision

The Women's Resource Centre was the second facility of its kind established in the Kootenays, opened shortly after a similar operation in Nelson in 1975, Karen Chastain explained. Chastain was part of the spirited band of local women who opened the centre in the mid '70s, after meeting as a consciousness raising group in her front room.

"I had just moved to the interior from San Francisco the year before," said Chastain, who has remained active on the board of directors of the Community Connections Society of Southeast B.C., the larger body that grew out of the Resource Centre project.

The Society board made the decision in early March to close the Women's Resource Centre -- a decision Chastain described as "heartbreaking" -- unless or until it can secure sustainable and ongoing funding to re-open the drop-in service for women. Reliable core funding of $50,000 a year would be enough to re-open the drop in, Chastain told The Tyee.

In the meantime, the Society continues to operate other programs, including homelessness outreach, a Better Babies pregnancy outreach, early childhood programs and a traveling poverty law advocacy program in rural areas.

Funding for the resource centre became precarious in 2004, when the provincial government de-funded women's centres across the province. Since then, the board, community volunteers and Vicky Dalton as the sole paid staff had cobbled together grants and run a modest deficit in order to keep it going.

Explaining the decision to close now, the Community Connections Society's executive director, Gwen Noble, said, "lack of consistent funding has been an issue since we lost government funding and we have been piecing funding together in an effort to continue to provide service to a very vulnerable and marginalized group of women and their families in our community.

"We have relied heavily on Gaming funds, on project and grant funding and on community donations which we have been very grateful for. However, we have reached a point where we can no longer sustain the service. Grants have been more difficult to obtain and donations have decreased over the years as the economy has worsened.

"Sadly this has happened at a time when the need is increasing and we are seeing more and more women and families in crisis and in need of our service."

'Woman of the Year'

The timing of the closure came, Noble noted, two days after International Women's Day, the annual celebration of the feminist organizing that led women around the world to develop services like the Women’s Resource Centre.

And it came three days after Vicky Dalton was co-recipient of a "Woman of the Year" award from the Cranbrook chapter of the Canadian Federation of University Women.

As if to add insult to injury, the closure happened in the middle of Community Social Service Awareness Month in B.C., a celebration endorsed by the provincial government and nearly 50 B.C. municipalities, including Cranbrook.

Citing the essential work done by community social services for battered women, crime victims, women and children and others, the provincial proclamation says, "The availability of these supportive services helps improve the quality of life for everyone, while making our communities stronger and more stable."

Chastain holds out hope the doors of the Cranbrook Women's Resource Centre can once again be unlocked and its services resumed. She has been meeting with other women and has formed a working group that is writing proposals and applications for funding. Her group is also looking into the possibility of a social enterprise, a business that could give unemployed women some work and generate income to help re-open the centre.

"Are we angry at the government? Absolutely," Chastain said. "These are people with pressing needs. They should be a priority. But mainly, we are in a planning process. We want to build a community of sustainable support to re-open the centre."

That would be good news for many women in Cranbrook, including one who told Vicky Dalton: "The Cranbrook Women's Centre has helped and supported me and my family, over a number of years, with food, clothing, medical trips out of town, direction to other agencies as well as the best moral and emotional support I have ever received."

Another former client of the centre told Dalton: "I came in here with no hope and no faith in mankind. I leave with a heart that's three times bigger."

Dalton said receiving the Woman of the Year award in the same week she had to close the centre was "bittersweet."

In the community of Cranbrook, she said, there now is a gap, previously occupied by a place "where women help each other. A real community."