We CAN Sing Challenge and Community Service Event

Being in Girl Guides allows us to work together as a team while planning a project that will bring about awareness for those who are less fortunate. Our We CAN Sing project was one of the ways that we as Pathfinders took action to help our community. It was great to see how our actions helped others and made a positive difference.  The project brought about awareness as we got our picture in the Liberal and SNAP so whoever read it would be able to see that we were contributing to our community. Hopefully this will bring about more awareness to encourage people to donate to the food bank.

This is what SNAP Richmond Hill said about our event:

“The 1st Oak Ridges Pathfinders were proud to organize the 8th annual all-unit campfire for Girl Guiding in Oak Ridges. More than 100 Sparks, Brownies, Guides, Pathfinders and leaders joined together at the Windham Ridge PS gym in Oak Ridges to celebrate the We CAN Sing Ontario Challenge. In addition to singing a selection of great campfire songs, participants were asked to provide a donation to the Aurora Pantry food bank. In the photo the Pathfinders display the generous donations which they will bring to the Aurora Pantry next week and help sort.”

We wanted to do the project to make an active difference in the community by helping others who are less fortunate.  We also thought that this was a good way to take action for a better community as we got all the other Oak Ridges Girl Guide units together so everyone could contribute to this cause. We faced some challenges like phoning people you don’t know and having to talk to them about the event. But I made a script and kept phoning people until I got more comfortable and left messages if they weren’t home.

Our Guiders were really impressed when we organized ourselves into three teams:

1.  Communications Team – prepared an invitation for the event, contacted unit Guiders and newspapers
2. Food Bank Team – made all arrangements with the local food bank (delivery, sorting, etc.)
3. Song Team – selected songs to accomplish the We CAN Sing challenge and led the entire evening.

It was great how a lot of people at the We CAN Sing campfire brought food to help make it a successful event and help us achieve our goal. I think that we were all successful as a team to make a positive difference in our community. This project made me realize how fortunate we are and that [food bank recipients] only get a very small amount of food compared to what we have and it has to last them a month.

By Stephanie, a first-year 1st Oak Ridges Pathfinder, with contributions from Guider Chickadee (Katherine), Coco (Kristi) and Ookpik (Carolyn), along with content from the original SNAP press release.