Elementary Students Take a Stand
Elementary Students Take a Stand
When the grade six/seven class at Chaffey-Burke Elementary School in Burnaby were tasked with a project that involved picking challenges they wanted to help address in their community we were proud to hear that they decided to focus on food insecurity and poverty. Once they agreed on the key issue the class chose The Salvation Army as the non-profit organization they wanted to help for their Community Kindness Challenge.
The next step for the class was determining how they would help us address these key issues, however as this project was being discussed in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic there was much uncertainty over what they would be able to do.
Students saw how often their classmates would lose their masks, they decided to make lanyards to help the kids keep track of their face coverings. Leading into the Christmas break the class got to work on creating lanyards that they could sell to other students and their families. They offered different choices and even gave the option to have lanyards personalized for a dollar more.
Unsure of how successful the program would be they started selling them for four dollars each and their teacher, Carlene Montgomery, expected them to raise somewhere between $300-$400. She was pleasantly surprised to learn that over the three-week period in December total sales, plus additional donations, helped raise $967.
“I think the families found it was a way to give back and support the school and kids in what was such an irregular year,” says Carlene.
After close to 200 lanyards were sold the students were all very proud of their hard work and felt they learned a lot about the different programs we offered during the research portion of their project. The teacher even had the student write “cheques” with the donation amount so they could learn how they work and gave them the opportunity to leave notes on where they wanted the money to go to and how they were hoping it could help. Our staff had their hearts warmed when they read messages that said things such as “I hope the money helps you provide more hot meals to people!”
To show our appreciation our Fund Development team sent them pairs of Salvation Army branded sunglasses, a suitable gift seeing how the future is looking very bright thanks to the generosity of these young philanthropists.
