Thousands of children helped by Attendance Matters program
This year, Surrey has asked The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund board, which administers Adopt-A-School, for $100,000 to provide food for Attendance Matters. Vancouver lawyer Jack Kowarsky’s decade of support for The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School (AAS) campaign on behalf of the Lohn Foundation has fed many thousands of impoverished school children arriving at school hungry. The […]
Funds help immigrant and refugee students learn
Since arriving as a refugee, Divyesh Gadhia has been driven to give back It’s an understatement to say Divyesh Gadhia has been a success in business. As president of Atiga Investments Inc. Gadhia, who lives in Burnaby, is credited with taking the company from near collapse to a $9 billion sale. And if there was […]
Riverdale Elementary’s food program has doubled in two years
There are 48 different languages spoken by children in Surrey’s Riverdale Elementary School. That’s 48 different ways to say “hungry”. When Rachel Ladd became principal of Riverdale Elementary in Surrey two years ago, about 40 children were coming to school looking for breakfast. Now, some days, there are 80. “It jumped up in the spring […]
Wraparound program helps at-risk youth
For any reasonable person what the articulate 17-year-old describes so matter of factly sitting on a park bench in a quiet part of Surrey is a nightmare. She left home at 14 and survived on the streets of Surrey and Vancouver – a child among misfits and predators – until being brought in from the […]
Food insecurity growing for schoolkids, even on Galiano Island
The school needs $4,000 in order to provide some students with a stable source of food and warm clothing GALIANO ISLAND — To describe this island as beautiful borders on the trite. It’s a magnificent 28 kilometres of rocky shores, rainforest, safe harbours and peace and quiet that attracts thousands of tourists and boaters each […]
Needs of hungry kids are daunting and we need your help
Even before this year’s Adopt-a-School program had launched, we’d received a record numbers of applications from schools seeking financial help to alleviate the suffering of these children — arriving at school hungry, or in clothes inappropriate for winter — total $2.9 million. That sum is daunting, but teachers, alarmed at what they are seeing, believe […]
Families in ‘a constant state of grieving’ from community’s high death rate
Tragedies from COVID, drug overdoses, suicide, old age, car accidents, organ failure, cold, exposure inevitably show up in schools. FORT ST. JAMES — The last few years have not been kind to this small community, a former fur-trading post on the shores of Stuart Lake. First came the pandemic and then the wildfires, which […]
When kids are hungry, you step up, says longtime contributor
“When you know there are kids who are hungry and need to be fed — what else can you do?” — David McCann Among the donors who support the Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School campaign, is there anyone more industrious in their commitment than David McCann? The general manager of Creekhouse Industries on Granville Island, McCann has […]
Nelson school’s grocery program a lifeline for children and parents
$7,000 from AAS would provide hot lunch subsidies, breakfast and snack program for children and funds for the family grocery support program. It’s a disturbing sign of the times when some parents find it necessary to seek financial help from schools in order to feed their children and themselves. But that’s the way of […]
Surrey’s Safe Schools WRAP program needs your help to assist others
Safe Schools is designed to intervene and prevent students — many of them impoverished — from being targeted and exploited by criminal gangs. She wept without a sound, just a hand shielding her eyes and a slight heaving of her chest, as she sat in the principal’s office in a North Surrey school — […]