Our History

History of the Organization

The North Waterloo Society for Crippled Children was established in March 1956 to operate Rotary Children's Centre. This followed decades of volunteer work of the Rotary Club of Kitchener that dedicated itself to serving "crippled children" in 1923. The Club members organized local medical clinics, hosted Christmas parties and fishing derbies, transported children to Toronto hospitals and operated local fund-raising events to buy necessary equipment and pay for medical services.

In the early 1950's, local Rotarians undertook the challenge of developing a treatment centre to serve local "crippled children". Thus, the North Waterloo Society for Crippled Children was formally established. The Rotary Club of Kitchener purchased property across from the K.W. Hospital and built a children's treatment centre. This continued a long and proud history of voluntary service by local Rotarians. The Rotary Children's Centre was constructed entirely through voluntary donations.

During the 1950's and 1960's the Rotary Children's Centre served children from Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph. There were several expansions to the Kitchener facility necessitated by the growing population of these communities and by the extension of therapy service to children with communication disorders and other disabilities.

As a result of this expansion of population and clientele, the Centre established a small clinic in Cambridge in 1972. This developed into a strategic partnership with the Cambridge Family YMCA that resulted in a co-location on the site of the new Cambridge Family YMCA in 1996. A further expansion resulted in new premises in 2003.

In 1995 the organization completed construction of a 54,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility in Waterloo to replace the smaller facility in Kitchener. This facility opened on September 26, 1995 following a successful $8 million capital campaign supported by government, local Rotary Clubs, corporations and many private supporters. Following continued growth a Guelph site was established in 1999 and this developed into a co-location partnership with the City of Guelph at their West End Community Centre. A Fergus site was established in 2001 through the support of the Fergus-Elora Rotary Club. In 2003 the name of the organization was officially changed to KidsAbility - Centre for Child Development.

1957-2007 - 50 Years in Retrospect

Returning from a meeting in Windsor in which he had participated as Kitchener-Waterloo Rotary’s representative for the formative discussions establishing the Ontario Society for Crippled Children, Alex Martin was passionate about the proposition that the Club’s initial service activity should focus on the care and treatment of crippled children. The concept was formally embraced by the membership of the Rotary Club of Kitchener Waterloo on December 18, 1922. When the Preston Rotary Club was formed in 1925, it joined forces with the Kitchener-Waterloo Club to partner in its mission of service to crippled children. That original decision has blossomed into today’s KidsAbility, a growth that the founding Rotarians could not have begun to imagine.

Dr. Glenn McFadden, who served as the Centre’s first Medical Director on a volunteer basis for some twenty-five years and who has been honoured as a Paul Harris Fellow in recognition of his exemplary service to society, encapsulates the history of the burgeoning Centre, Rotary’s role with respect to the Centre, and the role the physicians played in the evolution of the Centre. Dr. McFadden suggests that the
crippled children’s program quickly matured “When I came to town, Dr. Dave Bean, the Centre’s original medical director, said, ‘Look, this is your baby, not mine.’ So I took over the clinic. Actually, the clinic was really not that complicated. It was kids with foot problems, kids who needed a correction with their shoe or had something done in Toronto and were being seen here by the doctors who came from Toronto for this annual clinic. Eventually, we started doing more here and there weren’t as many youngsters going to Toronto. In fact, the practice of taking kids to Toronto finished by the time I quit practice some twenty years ago.”

Dr. McFadden commented that the children’s services had “grown like topsy”, when Ontario’s Department of Education approved the establishing of a School Board for the Rotary program in 1954. The Rotary Club of Kitchener-Waterloo was fully prepared to take the next step, a step that would lead directly to the doorways of the KidsAbility Centre. With this newly-achieved status came the requirement for a specifically-designed building; so, the Rotarians purchased a property at 828 King Street West across from the Kitchener Collegiate for $25,000 and set out to raise the $106,000 required to cover the cost of construction. 

Roy Brown, who chaired the Building Committee and who served as Executive Director from 1970 to 1980, recalled that support from both government and the local community was rather quick in coming. As a result, what might appropriately be termed the modern era of KidsAbility - Centre for Child Development began some fifty years ago on a cool spring day in 1957; when Kitchener-born and long-time local Rotarian the Honourable Louis Orville Breithaupt, Ontario’s Lieutenant-Governor, laid the cornerstone for the Centre’s first permanent facility. Dunker Construction set to work and the new building was formally opened on March 24, 1958.

Still, the services offered at the Centre were in constant demand and growing in complexity. In 1972 a speech clinic was established in Cambridge in the Grandview Medical Centre and 1975 saw the addition of a Life Skills Program as the Centre’s initiative to integrate its graduates meaningfully into society. As the nature of the Centre’s programs expanded, so did the King Street facility. The first addition was constructed in 1963, providing space for two classrooms and a specially-designed therapy pool. The second expansion followed in 1968, providing a library/meeting room, speech therapy offices, and a larger classroom. Nonetheless, space and availability continued to be problematic throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. Planning for a new and expanded facility began in earnest in the late 1980’s.

Roger Farwell, an architect and a partner at the Walter Fedy Partnership, was the senior design consultant for the KidsAbility facility that would take shape on Davenport Road. Farwell notes of the Davenport site:“This is as integrated a solution as our firm has ever been involved in in terms of people being invested, with many skills coming to the table, and they gave us the time and the patience to teach me and to teach others on the team. At the outset with the Building Committee and with Stephen Swatridge with whom I obviously worked very closely and ultimately with all the staff here we were in the midst of not only designing a building but we were in the midst of a cultural change in the organization in terms of how it would be conducted in the new facility and we wanted to use the design of this building as the
catalyst for that change.”

The fact that the design of the building was a community effort, a child-centered project, was reflected in the ground-breaking ceremonies which took place on April 15, 1994. Everyone was involved, especially the children. When the new Centre  opened on the 20th of September, 1995, a new leaf in the ongoing history of the Centre had also been turned.

Long-time Rotarian and long-time member of the Centre’s operating and Foundation boards, John Lynch, recalls that “To spearhead the fundraising for the Davenport building, Bob Collins-Wright looked after the funding south of the 401 because there were a lot of Cambridge kids who used the services in this area.” For his part, Collins-Wright notes that “I had said that I wouldn’t assist in fund-raising here unless they opened a centre in Cambridge; so, I was very pleased that we were able to locate it with the Chaplin Y because it’s an opportunity, it’s a wonderful location, and the facilities are tremendous.”

Respected local artist, Peter Etril Snyder, has augmented the Centre’s architectural design by painting the attractive seasonal “murals” that greet the visitor upon entering the Centre. Snyder observes that “It was obvious that this place was doing a wonderful job with children who desperately need help. When the new centre was proposed, I was fortunate enough to have a chance to sit down with the architects and put in my request for a space where I might be able to create a ‘mural’ for the lobby. As I was doing that painting around the edge of the rotunda, I got into conversation with the people from the Centre about expanding the mural project and also starting the annual painting series that have become a fixture.”

Penny MacVicar’s association with KidsAbility straddles both the King Street and the Davenport sites. She has been a personal witness to the evolution of the Centre and its service activities. Despite her obvious enthusiasm for KidsAbility, MacVicar has a balanced approach towards her assessment of the Centre that was and the Centre that is. As for the facilities, Penny comments that “The difference between the two buildings is phenomenal. The other building was something like 12,000 square feet and this one’s 55,000 square feet. The other Centre was innovative for its time: it looked like any of  the schools of that period. It was just this little corridor and the classrooms were decorated and looked like little school rooms with even the same fixtures and lockers with doors at the back. As the Centre grew and as therapies changed, the staff recognized the need for very specific designated areas, areas that were designed to suit speech, physiotherapy and occupational therapy. When they added on the other pieces, they tried to accommodate the growth, the change and the new technologies, but that was hard because of the way the building was built. And there was just no room for the equipment that was needed or the number of staff.”

The germ imbedded in Alex Martin’s recommendation made so long ago has not only matured but it continues to grow. Although the local Rotary clubs remain faithful to their original commitment to the program, today’s Centre has been rechristened “KidsAbility - Centre for Child Development” and, as the mission statement asserts, is an accredited charitable organization dedicated “to cultivating the potential of children and young adults who have developmental, physical, and communication disabilities.” While these services are child-centered,
they necessarily reach beyond the individual child to include the needs of the entire family. KidsAbility offers a variety of enabling program and services at its locations in Kitchener-Waterloo,Cambridge,Guelph and Fergus. These programs and services, includes physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech-language therapy, therapeutic recreation, social work, psychology, early childhood education, augmentative
communication, shool program, mobility training, medical services, autism intervention, and hearing services. Today’s Centre employs some 200 professional staff who are supported by almost 300 volunteers.

“Evolution” certainly is the right word to characterize the transition from Alex Martin’s proposal to his fellow Rotarians in 1922, to the laying of the King Street Centre’s cornerstone in 1957, to today’s state-of-the-art KidsAbility Centre on Davenport Road; from the early trips to Toronto to deal with corrective orthopedics to the multi-faceted developmental programs now being offered at KidsAbility’s various sites. But the evolution continues: KidsAbility is bulging at the seams even as hundreds of children and their parents wait for their necessary services. The vitality of today’s KidsAbility is surely a pre-cursor of still more exciting services to come, services of which today’s professional staff may not yet have even begun to dream.