Four years ago staff in a Surrey heating supply company were disturbed at discovering the extent at which impoverished students in their neighbourhood were suffering.

“We were reading The Vancouver Sun about what was happening and decided we had to provide an inner-city school with emergency funds,” says Ashley Bouchard, general manager of Raven Hydronic Supply.

Raven isn’t a huge company – it has only seven employees – but the $5,000 it provided that year (and every year since) was transformative for some students at Frank Hurt Secondary, said principal Mike Stickley. This act of corporate concern and social responsibility has enabled the school to help students in ways it could not have done before, he said.