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| Kelly charitable donation 'more than a simple gift' Funeral magnate's children want to give back to home town
Photo by Pat McGrath Page C11 Posted with permission from the Ottawa Citizen. A recent $350,000 endowment by the sons and daughters of local funeral home magnate Lorne Kelly is more than a simple gift, son Gerry Kelly says. It's a sign of the enduring connection between the family and the city that raised them. "When the funeral home was sold, it became clear to us that it was a real change of an era for us in this city," Gerry Kelly said in an interview yesterday. "We kind of took stock at that point. (We wanted) to give an expression of thanks, not only to our parents and to my father for all he did in the funeral home, but also for the community who supported us."
The Kelly siblings announced the donation to the Community Foundation of Ottawa earlier this week. It will serve to fund initiatives in palliative care, mental health and addiction issues.
Lorne Kelly, 80, sold his eight funeral homes, including seven in the Ottawa area and one in Quyon, in early November to Arbor Memorial Services Inc. for $24 million. Arbor is a Canadian chain with 94 homes and related operations in eight provinces.
Until it was sold, Kelly Funeral Homes was Ottawa's largest remaining independent funeral home business, performing about 1,600 funerals a year. None of Mr. Kelly's six remaining sons and daughters worked in the business. Nevertheless, the family business -- like the community itself -- helped shape the identity of the Kelly siblings. Gerry, the second-eldest son is a sessional theology lecturer at Saint Paul University and a reconciliation expert. He spent all but two of his pre-adult years living in one of the family's funeral homes -- first in the home on top of a Wellington Street grocery store and later on Carling Avenue. "It would have been impossible for our parents to raise seven of us over the funeral home if it wasn't for the fact that we lived in a city where we all had access to multiple other resources, whether it was sports or arts or those sorts of things." The Kelly Family Foundation will give about four per cent of its principal to local charities every year. The family will help choose those charities. Barbara McInnes, president of the Community Foundation of Ottawa, praised the Kellys for allowing their story to be told. "Philanthropy breeds philanthropy," she said yesterday. "So when people hear about this kind of story it often inspires something in themselves. We were just blown away by it." The Ottawa Community Foundation has close to $86 million in pooled assets, including 500 individual funds.
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