This past Saturday my family and I volunteered with some friends from TELUS during their annual Day of Giving where across the country 15,000 of their employees (and friends!) volunteer their time to help out different organizations in their communities. The idea is to "make a powerful positive impact on our local communities in Canada" and they've been doing it every May since 2006.
We volunteered at the Pacific Assistance Dogs Society, a Burnaby non-profit that trains dogs who go to work helping people with physical disabilities, and which relies entirely on grants, donations and volunteers to stay afloat. We got to meet a bunch of their pups in training then got to work helping pull weeds out of their landscaping. They've got a fairly large property where they keep and train their dogs and they were over the moon with appreciation that our group of about 20 folks came in to help clean things up.
My son Arlo shows off some of the weeds we helped pull at PADS
I feel lucky that we work with partners who do work like this and I love that I'm sometimes able to piggyback on them to teach my son about the importance of giving back.
Here are some of the things they got done during last year's Day of Giving:
- 5,309 bags of waste collected from river valleys, parks, and fields
- 31,891 meals prepared or served to the homeless and those in need
- 213,945 pounds of food sorted at food banks
- 9,171 trees and plants planted in parks and gardens
- 10,500 Kits for Kids assembled to provide school supplies to students in inner city schools
- 1,625 Comfort Kids assembled for the homeless
- 230,463 breast cancer ribbons tied for the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation
Look for them (and us) helping out more organizations again next May.
