Categories
sponsored Uncategorized

The Great Camp Adventure, Family FUNdraising for SickKids




This post is brought to you by The Canaccord Genuity Great Camp Adventure benefiting SickKids.

We all want our children to be good, generous, kind and giving. We especially want that when they’re embroiled in a protracted battle with their siblings in the middle of a six-hour car ride. But that’s another story.

We already know how important it is to role model the kind of behaviour we want to see from our children. We see how powerful that influence is when they decide to donate half their piggy bank to a good cause (or when they sound just like you when they lose their temper, whichever.) But what could be better than doing something fun and worthwhile together as a family?

This September 28, The Great Camp Adventure is a one-day, challenge-by-choice, camp-themed, FUNdraising walk for the entire family. All proceeds go to the Sick Kids Possibility Fund where they can support the hospital’s most urgent needs.

The Great Camp Adventure is designed to be a day of fun for the entire family and beyond, from babies to grannies, neighbours to coworkers. Have fun making your way along a 20km route (go as far as you like, no need to do the whole thing!) with lots of campsite-style pit stops full of snacks and activities along the way.

Register now to get your FUNdraising game on. There’s a $500 fundraising minimum for adults and $150 for children which makes this an incredibly easy way to get your whole family working together for a good cause. Have a few more questions? No worries. Head over here to fill out a request for more info.

I honestly can’t think of a better way to spend a day with my family.

This post is sponsored by The Canaccord Genuity Great Camp Adventure. Opinions and words are still mine, of course.

Categories
Uncategorized

Family Shopping For Another Needy Family

This week or next at a home near you.

Each year my husband’s extended family gets together the week before Christmas to shop as a family for another family. About 20 years ago (give or take a couple), they realized that they could take the money they spent on gifts for each other and help make Christmas that much more special for a needy family in their area.

Categories
Uncategorized

‘Tis the Season to Give a Crap

The holidays are here again, so brace yourself for the inevitable tug of war between charity and commercialism. The Christmas season should be about giving to others, we all know that, but we also want to give to our own family. This Christmas Colum is old enough to really look forward to the loot, to write a letter to Santa and to be wowed by the presents on Christmas morning. And I really want to wow him. So I think, sure I’ll give to others after I have taken care of my own family. I think, I support giving and charity, I do, and it’s really great that other people are so into that kind of thing. They must have more money and time and fewer responsibilities than I do.

But then I think of my mother and my mother-in-law. These are two women who have raised four children each and worked full-time jobs and balanced budgets and somehow managed to put food on the table and shoes on our feet no matter how scarce money was. They also managed to be everywhere at once: the skating rink and ballet classes and school plays and baseball games. From the PTA and Boy Scouts (Donna) to nursing relatives on their death beds and sitting on the floor of a Greyhound bus while eight months pregnant (Mom), there is nothing these women wouldn’t do. Their entire lives have been guided by a sense of giving and self-sacrifice. They volunteer their time and energy and money as a matter of course, never stopping to wonder if they have enough to spare. Whenever and wherever a need arises, these women automatically ask themselves, “How can I help?” (Not “Should I help?” or “I wish I could help.”) And then, swiftly and quietly, they do.

So when I started seeing initiatives that encourage bloggers to use their corporate and social networking connections to pay their good fortune forward I thought, good. I mean, after the recent scourge of name calling and finger pointing that has been dominating mommy-blogging circles in the lead up to and the wake of the new FTC regulations (the assumption that we are all corporate whores, essentially, willing to give it up for free crap), this is a breath of fresh air. Initiatives like Her Bad Mother’s Give Good Blog or Mamanista’s Bloganthropy encourage bloggers to champion a cause and to exploit any corporate contacts in doing so.

Yeah, bloggers should totally do that, I thought. I would too if only I were more widely read and had more companies knocking at my door. But wait. I did use my blog to host an online raffle for breast cancer research at the Princess Margaret Hospital. And I did reach out to family-oriented businesses, many run by moms who are friendly with the blogging community for awesome donations. And they did come through. I actually used my blog to raise over $2000 in personal donations to the Weekend To End Breast Cancer. When my good friend Gillian lost her baby, I blogged about that and made up a button that links to the Sick Kids Foundation’s donation page and stuck it at the bottom of that post and in my sidebar. Huh.

Maybe I can do something after all. So then I emailed Kathryn Easter from Mom Central Canada and said, Hey. You know that giveaway we’re doing for Disney on Ice? What are the chances we can get another set of tickets to give to a family that is spending the holidays at Interval House, a safe haven for abused women and children? And Kathryn said, Let’s do it up. (I’m totally paraphrasing, you know.) And so we are.

I tell you all this not to toot my own horn. (Although I guess that is the biggest effect, isn’t it?) Mostly I tell you all this because if I can actually do some good with this blog and its regular readership of my family and friends and the hundreds of porn-bot followers I have on Twitter, then imagine what you can do. You don’t need a hugely successful blog to make a difference. You don’t even need a blog at all.

My mother and mother-in-law didn’t have blogs, after all. Hell, they didn’t even have Facebook. (I know!) And they still managed to find a way to do good things for people in need. So if we all just try to be a little more like them, then we don’t even need a formal declaration. We just need to act.

On that note, let the holiday season begin.

(Image courtesy of saxon on Flickr.)