With summer holidays in sight, students at the Linwood Public School this week had a chance to look back on the year’s fundraising achievements … with a bit of celebratory ice-cream.
Given the accomplishments, the treat was well deserved. The Grades 7 and 8 students, along with the help of kindergarten teachers Jean Healey-Martin and Michelle Speck, raised more than $1,400 through a number of events over the year. They organized a pumpkin-carving contest in the fall, sold “candy-grams” in February, and most recently had a profitable bake sale.
The students also spearheaded a food-drive to help their local community, and organized a “Toonies for Toys” event at their school for Christmas. They were also able to help those farther abroad, teaming up with the ME to WE not-for-profit to help communities in Kenya in a sustainable way.
The students’ original goal, said Healey-Martin, was to raise enough money to provide a single Kenyan family with a lifetime of clean water, which cost only $50. “So we did that easily and quickly.”
The kids next aimed for a far more ambitious target: a year’s worth of nutritious food for an entire class in Kenya for the sum of $1,000.
Eventually, they had raised enough cash to invest in each of the ME to WE’s five “pillars,” five of the root causes of poverty that the organization has identified: education, water, health, food, and opportunity.
Healey-Martin says the kids were keen to focus on Kenya because of their experience with a former Kenyan student who intermittently attended Linwood PS.
