On Thursday night PARTNERS Family Services celebrated their 15 year anniversary at the Humboldt & District Art Gallery.

The night was focused on the long list of volunteers that the family crisis organization has seen come and go over the years.

One of those people is Deborah Bryson-Sarauer was a founding board member and sits on the executive today,

She said PARTNERS was started when a local woman needed help but it wasn't available.

"We didn't have such a group in town and I did a bit of a survey around the people who were offering services in Humboldt including the RCMP and the hospital and so on and asked them how they helped people. The churches were really interested in me starting a group."

PARTNERS was launched with an initial $3,000 grant. It has endured a recent move and a couple name changes but today the family support centre offers services such as support through the Soup Kitchen, Summer camps, home support as well as having a trained family crisis team.

Bryson-Sarauer talked about the vision she had for the organization through the eyes of a social worker, her trained profession.

"My intention at first was just to make sure that the woman and the men involved in domestic violence and their children were safe, so both the abuser and abused person and their children were safe and that we had resources in our community to help families and that there was no bad guy."

Bryson-Sarauer continued to express the importance of the organization a decade and a half later.

"We need to now that even though we live in a good community and the people that live here are good people there is still domestic violence and there is still violence in other ways as well. It doesn't mean we're a bad community, it means we're a normal community."

"Where Humboldt would be without PARTNERS, it would be sadder," she concluded.

PARTNERS does do some of their own fundraising but the they mostly rely on is almost $500,000 from the Ministry of Social Services.

You can hear much more from Bryson-Sarauer below in her interview with Bolt FM's Clark Stork below.

All the past and current board members of PARTNERS were recognized on Thursday night for their crucial roles in the organization's success.