Trinity Church Streetsville - A real Difference
In 2021, BCF member Heather Smith asked the Foundation for $1,500 to help digitize the records in Trinity Streetsville's historic cemetery. This was to be the seed money for a significant restoration project which she has recently completed.
Trinity prayer garden early renovations, 2022.
When Heather took on the management of Trinity Streetsville's cemetery in March 2020, she found that there was a lot of work that needed to be done. Its records and processes were paper-based and had significant gaps and there were numerous challenges in the cemetery itself such as dangerous trees, rusted fences, uneven ground, and overgrown monuments. In fact, "many people in our church and community didn't even know the cemetery was there and that it was still an active cemetery," she said. All of these challenges were seen as a significant potential drain on church finances.
Volunteers cleaning gravestones.
As Cemetery Team leader, Heather began turning these challenges into opportunities. After consulting with other cemetery operators, she started with modernizing the record system selecting a software suite called “Chronicle”, which combines aerial drone imaging with the church’s records to show the position an individual’s grave on a top-down map (link included at the bottom of the page).
Her ambitions didn’t end at fixing the records, however. “We wanted to make the cemetery an engaging part of the church and the community by restoring it and retooling it for the current needs of our church and community." Proposed changes included making the cemetery fully accessible, the creation of a prayer garden, adding pathways and benches, landscaping and trees and historic signage.
Heather Smith and Hazel McCallion, the previous mayor of Mississauga.
She estimated that $150,000 would be required to bring this vision into reality, a sum that the church was unable to provide so church leaders agreed that she could seek external donations for this work. The Burton Charitable Foundation's 2021 Supplemental Donation was the first injection of funds to this project. Heather said, "it was very encouraging to get that grant. It helped overcome people's skepticism that we could do this. It made a real difference to us."
Volunteer giving a historic tour of the Trinity cemetery.
Since then, many individuals and organizations in the Streetsville community have stepped up to contribute $180,000 to Trinity Cemetery’s restoration project, which now includes a praryer garden in honour of Sam and Hazel McCallion (Mississauga's long-serving mayor). This has enabled Heather and her team to create a beautiful outdoor space that not only honours Streetsville's heritage but welcomes community and church members to enjoy nature, meet, walk and pray. The fully-restored cemetery's dedication ceremony took place on the 1st of June, 2023.
Fully restored prayer garden, 2023.