committed community members striving to help their neighbours in need
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"Helping our Community Thrive, One Family at a Time"
In 2021, when our local mamas-for-mamas west kootenays group was unable to do Christmas Hampers due to a lack of volunteers, our team of then 5 - then the next year turned into 3 passionate individuals stepped up to make it happen. Ash and Tom being two business owners with a dream of prospering their community, and Annick their passionate employee who just escaped financial hardship herself. With the resources we had, the trust we had within our community, and a lot of outside help, we started our Christmas Hamper program. The first year had a lot of growing pains, yet we still ended up successfully helping 40 families.
In the second year, we centralized our operations, we digitalized our back-end work; we started working like a well oiled machine. We tagged along an extra community in our second year, which is how we ended up helping 80 families that year. In 2023, we were lucky enough to onboard Tracy Mercer, and together with her and a lot of other returning volunteers we were able to help 100 families with making Christmas a lot easier.
In 2024 we became an official not-for-profit, which opened doors to more funding opportunities. We are so excited to get this program build out more, and we can't wait to see what the future brings!
Our current status is Registered Not-for-Profit under the BC Societies Act. We are working on reaching our Charity Status, but as for now, we are unable to give out Income Tax Receipts. If you have any advice on how to become a charity, we would love to hear from you.
Find us on Facebook & Instagram!
Our Facebook & Instagram pages are the best way for us to put public information out there. However, we have the best traction in our Facebook group "Adopt-a-Family for the Holidays Greater Trail and Castlegar". ​In this group, everyone can ask questions, and it is a great platform to keep all that are associated involved. The Facebook algorythm seems to favour Facebook groups on news feeds, so having both keeps it well balanced.