Woodbridge Centre

Shining Through’s story begins in 1999 with five families enrolling their children in an ABA program at Shining Through Therapy Centre in Newmarket. In response to the need for more funding for the centre, the parents of these families organized a fundraising gala.

The story of their children who desperately needed the intervention the Centre provided inspired 600 people to attend the gala. Unbeknownst to the five families, this gala was their first step towards running a centre of their own.

Despite the enormous success of the gala, the Shining Through Therapy Centre was forced to close its doors. The five families were left with a choice: lose the vital service the centre had provided to their children or take ownership of their children’s education.

They chose the latter.

In January of 2001 - after a building acquisition and 6 months of renovating one room at a time with the support of their friends and family - they opened the Shining Through Centre for Children with Autism in Woodbridge. Today, the fundraising gala attracts over 1,000 people each year and generates over a quarter of a million dollars of revenue for the centre. Alive and well, Shining Through Centre continues to attract internationally renowned staff and is preparing to expand so that more children and their families can build positive futures.

What happened to the original five families?

Their hearts and hands are still intertwined with the running of the school and their dedication, perseverance and resourcefulness continue to inspire Shining Through Centre's staff, families and its many supporters.

 

Beecroft Centre

The building in which the Beecroft Centre currently resides has been a meeting place and landmark for Toronto residents for nearly 150 years. Joseph Shepard II built it around 1860 on the northwest corner of Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue (the road to which his family gave its name, although with a different spelling) as both store and family home.

When this building was built, most of what would become the city of North York was farmland. Where roads conveniently met, villages grew to service the surrounding rural community. Lansing, at the intersection of Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue, had the added advantage of being on the main North-South route into and out of Toronto. By the 1870s, Lansing boasted an inn, a doctor’s office, and several stores, including Shepard’s general store, a wagon shop, an agricultural implements shop, and a shoemaker’s business.

Under the proprietorship of Shepard (and, from 1888, Benjamin Brown), the general store, post office, milk depot, and stage coach stop provided many of the goods and services needed in the farming community on Lansing, from groceries, hardware, farm supplies, and dry goods such as cloth and dishes . . . to community news and a warm place to wait for a ride down Yonge Street.

The store was bought in 1921 by brothers Bill and George Dempsey, who concentrated on hardware stock. In the 1960s, George’s sons Jim and Bob took over operation of the store. Widely known, “Dempsey’s” provided generations of North Yorkers with all the barbeques, appliances, garden seeds, fishing lures, tools, and hardware required by residents of this growing suburban municipality.

While North York remained largely rural until after World War II ended in 1945, the farms on both sides of Yonge Street were subdivided into smaller building lots by the 1920s. Lansing grew as a residential community, with restaurants, gas stations, banks, and other modern services lining Yonge Street. Supermarkets and specialty stores began to replace 19th-century businesses.

As North York was transformed from farmland to suburb in the 1950s and 1960s, Yonge Street became increasingly important as a business district.  The first redevelopment of the Yonge/Sheppard intersection came with the construction of the Sheppard Centre in the early 1970s.  The opening of the Yonge subway line’s Sheppard Station in 1974 gave further encouragement to high-rise development.  At the same time, the widening of both Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue brought the busy streets closer to the Dempsey Store’s walls.

The country hardware store could no longer survive. In 1989, Jim Dempsey sold his property to a development company that planned to build a multi-storey office and commercial development on the site.  Another planned widening of Sheppard Avenue, along with the TTC’s plans for the extension of the subway line, also threatened the store.  Briefly, the Dempsey Store - now one of two surviving 19th-century commercial building in North York - was in danger of disappearing for good.

Fortunately, the Prudential Assurance Company Limited, which had bought the building, agreed to help preserve it.  They donated it, plus funds for its move and restoration, to the City of North York.  The city provided a site for the store in the new Beecroft Park. On a frigid February day in 12996, the store was hydraulically lifted off its old foundations and wheeled 1.5  kilometers from its original site, to start a new chapter in its life.