The Turtle Valley Donkey Refuge near Chase was given $52,465 from the province’s community gaming grants.
The money will help them enhance and expand their pastures, that is home to 119 donkeys right now.
Shirley Mainprize, the founder and president of Turtle Valley says the money will help them build a secondary well, to keep the grass growing, as they can’t rely on rains anymore.
“It allows us to have more pastures so that we can move the donkeys from one pasture to another to allow the one to be irrigated and then rest,” she said.
“It helps us handle the manure that we compost and put back on the pastures and sell to folks living around the area for their gardens.”
Mainprize says they’ve been at their current farm for four years.
“We spent those four years building up barns and some pastures,” she said. “So we needed to add more for the donkeys to go out and eat in the summer on green grass.”
“The funds from gaming gave us the money to put in more pasture, and that’s basically gates and fencing etc.”
Mainprize says they have about a year to raise another roughly $52,000 to get their expansion built.