Thank you for a fantastic year! As we look back on 2011, it is serves as an example of how community can work together to build evoke change. Thanks to your support, we have given over 16 000 makeovers in the past 11 years. In 2011 thanks to over 500 volunteers, we have given over 5000 makeovers.
Volunteer Management
Thanks to Julia Pon, Vickie Chow, Aayusha Koirala, Lucinda Yeung, Erin Samuda, Erin Brown, Elise Tan, and Christine Schultz for volunteer management and facilitating the events. Thanks to you we’ve been able to train more people.
Vancouver Foundation Invests in our Life-Makeover Program
One of our biggest goals this year was to find a way to lead and support our 500 plus volunteers to build self esteem and change lives through wellness, life skills development and makeovers. Thanks to the Vancouver Foundation, we were able to continue to have Caroline MacGillivray lead the program coordination of our life-makeover program. Since 2010, Vancouver Foundation has invested $45, 000 over 3 years to our Life-Makeover program. Working with our participants, volunteers and community partners we were able to see where we could strengthen the program.
YVR Twestival 2011
To have one staff member lead 500 volunteers can be a daunting task. When we spoke to our supporters, they rallied the community to get involved in raising the money so we could develop the leadership to offer our programming to more women. In March 2011, we were chosen of charity of choice for YVR Twestival. We were thrilled to have Vancouver’s twitter community come together in a huge tweetup. An evening of mingling and meeting people off line was held at Vancouver Lookout. Led by Miss 604 and Marc Smith from Amuse Consulting, YVR Twestival was a success. They raised over $8000 through ticket sales and silent auction to help us train 3 facilitators to expand our programming. Mayor Gregor Roberson made the opening remarks. Companies such as London Drugs, Lonsdale Rentals, Libre Tea, Dragon Truck and many more helped make this event happen.
A Website Makeover Thanks to Design Faire
Erika Harrison from the IABC/BC team of volunteers from the social media community grant we had received in 2010 spoke to Vanessa Chu from Design Faire to see if she could help us with our website. In less than 14 days, Vanessa had a new website up that reflected our new branding. * The branding was through our promotions committee and IABC/BC during our 10 year anniversary planning. We realized our branding did not reflect the work our society did. Thanks to founding board member, Pamela Lelong we revisited our bylaws and rebuilt our brand based on the cause that we build our society on and the work we continue to do.
With a new website and print materials (thank you Heather Vince) to tell people about our cause, we continued to let people know we were aiming to train 3 facilitators. Three groups of high schools students approached us to be their charity of choice for their YPI (Youth Philanthropy Initiative) project. Honoured to be chosen, we sat down with each group. The students had to create a video and do a presentation about their charity. The winning charity would receive $5000 for it’s cause. We were thrilled to be the recipient of Balmoral Secondary’s charity of choice for the YPI award.
Partnership with UBC Learning Exchange & Chapman Grant
Thanks to our partnership with UBC Trek/ Learning Exchange, we were told one of the students who volunteered for us through this program could apply for a Chapman grant to help us with a student driven program. We told them about our wish to train 3 facilitators and create training materials to continue to build leadership. Lucinda Yeung, one of our UBC Trek students applied for support for our cause. Her proposal was accepted. Through the Chapman Grant, we had an additional $4000 to train 3 UBC Trek students to facilitate our programming.
Canadian Medical Association Invests $2500 in Our Cause
Julia Pon applied for support from the Canadian Medical Association to train 3 medical students to facilitate Beauty Night programming and to educate volunteers in trauma awareness.Through the trauma awareness training, many of our health care volunteers say the training has helped improve bed side manner while working with patients and our participants.
