About the Foundation
The Masonic Foundation was incorporated under the Nova Scotia Societies Act in 1969, is independent of Grand Lodge and registered with the Canada Revenue Agency as a public foundation.
The Registered Charitable number is 119034510. Its purpose is to engage in the welfare and charitable work of Masonry.
The Masonic Foundation has elected and appointed members. Each year at The Masonic Foundation’s annual meeting, Master Masons are given an opportunity to receive reports of the Foundation’s activities
and elect new directors to the Foundation.
One of our Special Grants projects:
The Learning Centre for Children
The Learning Centre for Children commenced operations in September 2006 to deliver remedial tutoring to children who have been formally identified as having a learning disability know as dyslexia. The Centre is operated by members from a number of the Masonic Lodges in the Halifax-Dartmouth Metropolitan Area.
Dyslexia is a neurologically based, often inherited, disorder which interferes with the acquisition and processing of language. It varies in degree of severity among individuals and is present to some degree in 15% of our population. It is not curable but can be overcome through appropriate remediation.
The remedial tutoring at the Learning Centre for Children Halifax is being delivered by volunteers who have been trained in the Orton-Gillingham method of remediation, a structured, sequential, phonemic, directly taught and multi-sensory approach. The effectiveness of this approach has been overwhelming. Parents speak of growing confidence and increased self-esteem in their children; reluctant, clock-watching readers have become ones who will ask to read “just one more chapter” and children come to the Centre bearing books and telling of their reading adventures.
Each child in the program receives two one hour tutoring sessions each week, during the period that roughly equates to the public school year, and takes three years to complete. The tutoring sessions take place in the late afternoon and early evening to avoid interfering with normal school attendance. The remedial tutoring is provided at no cost to the families of those children enrolled at the Centre.
The Halifax Learning Centre is the largest of the Centres now being operated by Freemasons at eight locations across Canada, stretching from Vancouver to Halifax. Each Centre is incorporated as a not for profit entity, is a registered charity under the Income Tax Act (Canada), and utilizes a Program developed by the Scottish Rite Charitable Foundation of Canada under a license agreement.
This is truly an example of “Freemasons helping Children.”
