Terrace school’s breakfast, lunch program at risk
Terrace Middle School needs $10,000 from The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School campaign to get through the year. Sonja Donnan is seeing an increasing number of students arrive at Skeena Middle School hungry each day, and the worry is she’s going to run out of the money she has available to feed them. “The numbers keep growing. […]
Donations from family and friends not enough to keep food program afloat
James Hill Elementary Principal Lynn Fairley is asking The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School campaign for $11,000 to keep her breakfast, lunch and weekend food going. What do you do as a principal when you see 26 children coming to school hungry every day without food for lunch or just a meagre sandwich, and at least eight […]
Isolated elementary school looking to provide simple snacks for hungry kids
It’s a trek of 90 kilometres down Highway 28 from this central Vancouver Island village to reach any source of fresh produce. Natasha Toth would like to have a hot breakfast available to serve hungry children entering Ray Watkins Elementary in the morning, but she doesn’t have the staff or resources to pull it off. […]
Nanaimo school’s food program will run out of money by Christmas
Knox is asking for $22,000 from The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School campaign to carry on after Christmas as no other source of money has materialized. Holly Knox has 200 or so impoverished teenagers who need to be fed breakfast and lunch every day, which requires 40,000 food servings for the entire school year. But in September, […]
Vancouver Sun charity marks 10th year of helping schoolkids
Before the pandemic of 2019, approximately one in five of this province’s children lived below the poverty line. Almost two years into this crisis there is every sign that poverty has captured even more children and families. This year marks the 10th anniversary of The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School campaign, which since 2011 has distributed about […]
Shelley Fralic: An advocate for children in need
There are thousands of children in this province who have been fed, clothed and cherished because of the concern and compassion of Shelley Fralic, one of the instigators of the Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-a-School program. She was not only involved in its inception in 2011 but worked tirelessly on The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund board of […]
Adopt-A-School: $1.2 million in grants given out to schools and organizations
“We have never had so many requests for help before. It is a measure of our readers’ concern and generosity that we have been able to meet these requests.” — Harold Munro, editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun and board chair. The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund board has approved 121 grants totalling $1.2 million in recent […]
Adopt-A-School: Resilience in children should never be confused with tragedy
By recognizing “resilience” as anything other than a tragedy in the life of an impoverished child — and to speak of it as something vaguely admirable — is to ignore the conditions that caused it, no matter how well meaning the observer. Last spring Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician in Flint, Michigan, whose relentless advocacy […]
Adopt-A-School: Hunger, poverty not limited to just inner-city schools
Although the school boundary stretches all the way north to within 40 kilometres of Egmont and south down the bucolic highway to Sechelt, Pender Harbour Elementary-Secondary school has just 75 students. The small, rural school over which principal Chris Lekakis presides, with its totems out front on the Sunshine Coast Highway, isn’t immune from the […]
Adopt-A-School: 16-year-old homeless girl survives with the help of Safe Schools team
“I became homeless in the summer of 2019. But in my heart I knew I’d never had a home, I never had stability.” — 16-year-old homeless girl The Christmas Eve story is about homelessness and so is this: the story of a homeless teenager searching for a safe place for the night. Violence, abuse, depression […]