Dear Editor:
It was with great sadness that I read of the passing of Ellen Lloyd in the Feb. 13 Summerland Review.
In the late 1990s Ellen picked up the torch lit by the School District in a community action survey on 40 developmental assets through the Search Institute.
Ellen was one of the founding board members of the Summerland Asset Development Initiative at a time when there was no building, no society and a handful of support.
Through Ellen and the rest of the directors requests were successfully put out for Grants in Aid, a building and interim office space to our generous Municipality. Soon after, Ellen visited England and brought back the Vision of establishing a charity shop in Summerland to support all of our youth. At that time, she and four other community members formed the Summerland Charity Shop Society which morphed quickly into the Penny Lane Bargain Outlet.
Over the years, many of us in the community were invited by Ellen into providing building supplies, funding, chaperoning, sponsoring, hosting beds, public speaking lessons and any other skills that Ellen deemed would be of benefit to our youth.
In reality though, for those of us that were corralled by Ellen we found immense personal pride in enabling all those young people to achieve their individual goals.
So, as you tour through Summerland and you pass by the SADI building and see the young people in activities, or you hear people remark on how polite our youth are at the Philosophers Café or one or two late 20-somethings speak enthusiastically about their time on the “Speakers’ Bureau,” please take a moment to think about Ellen Lloyd and her contribution to the Youth in our community.
Linda Van Alphen
Summerland