CHRISTMAS FUND
Group has helped since 1910 and is ‘agency of last resort,’ says its executive director
Today is Giving Tuesday, an ideal time to reach out and help those supported by the Herald Christmas Fund. This year’s supported agencies include Samaritan Club of Calgary food programs, overseen at St. Mark Elementary School by teacher Lindsay Dell, seen here with students Sara, Fikadu and Angelo.
Lindsay Dell’s Grade 6 classroom is filled with all the usual things you’d expect, from the desks covered with binders and cups overflowing with pens and pencils, to the colourful art projects taped to the walls.
One corner, though, is reserved for something unique: shelves hold a variety of food products. There’s one bin for healthy cereal, another for granola bars and still more with the kinds of morning sustenance most children take for granted.
“My Grade 6 students are very proud of how organized it is,” says Dell, who has been teaching at St. Mark School for the past decade. “I just buy the groceries, but it’s their program to run.”
At this school in Calgary’s northeast Marlborough neighbourhood, Dell’s students come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and many of them are children of immigrants and refugees. It’s not unusual for their parents to hold down two or more jobs to pay the bills and, lacking their own means of transportation, find they only have the time to take the bus once a week to buy groceries.
“They have a lot of day-today challenges,” says Dell, “and because of that, we found that some kids were eating their lunches in the morning, because they didn’t have enough to eat before they came to school. Then they were hungry at lunchtime.”
Dell, who helped to run the program at the school for a few years, had to temporarily halt it after they lost their funding. The Samaritan Club of Calgary came to the rescue. “I was approached by them and asked what we would choose funding for,” she says with a smile. “So we were able to bring back a program that is great for all the kids, from the ones who need breakfast to those who help, which really teaches them a lot about citizenship and community involvement.”
The Samaritan Club of Calgary (samaritanclub.ca) is one of 13 recipients of the 2018 Calgary Herald Christmas Fund. The brainchild of Herald newsroom employees in 1991, the fund has raised nearly $27 million. Every penny donated goes directly to local social agencies dedicated to addressing critical needs in our community. Each year, a volunteer selection committee made up of Postmedia employees selects worthy charities from more than 100 applications, featuring their stories in the Herald and thereby giving Herald readers the opportunity to help out.
The club, in its first year of being a Herald Christmas Fund recipient, may not be a familiar name to many Calgarians.
“We fly a bit under the radar, because we don’t deal directly with the public,” says Gail Lusis, the Samaritan Club of Calgary’s executive officer. “But we are in direct contact regularly with social workers and agencies around the city, helping them to help people who fall through the cracks.”
While it has definitely been what Lusis describes as a “quiet charity,” the Samaritan Club of Calgary has been making a difference in our city for more than a century. Originally called The Young Women’s Benevolent Society, it was founded in 1910 by Lenora Woods, wife of then-Calgary Herald publisher J. H. Woods. During the height of the First World War, Woods and her small band of female members could be seen driving around town on their horse-drawn wagons, collecting items for the Prisoner of War Fund. When they weren’t in transit, they were holding fundraising tea parties, concerts and rummage sales.
Over the decades, fundraising expanded to include everything from golf tournaments and casinos to partnerships with the Calgary Stampede. Their famous Super Sales, held in both the spring and fall at the Hillhurst Sunnyside Centre, continue to be their biggest fundraising events of the year. Today, the club is going strong, with approximately 170 members, all volunteers who pay an annual fee to ensure there are no overhead costs and that 100 per cent of the funds they raise go to their recipients.
“We are really an agency of last resort,” says Lusis of the organization which helps Calgarians who have been referred by social workers, community support workers and health-care professionals.
Quiet as they are, the dedicated volunteer members have made a big impact in the lives of countless Calgarians, in a variety of ways. Recent donation recipients include an elderly woman in dire need of new dentures and a man whose scooter had broken down. Unable to secure funds from any other agency, his social worker turned to the Samaritan Club to get him back on his scooter and no longer housebound.
The club has been a regular donor to several kids’ camps that don’t receive traditional funding, has a longtime layette program for new moms in poverty and recently helped to create a “move out” fund for senior clients at the Kerby Centre. It’s also known for its food and transportation vouchers and other emergency assistance for low-income individuals and families in crisis.
“When you are on the front lines and trying to find a lastresort funding source for your client, who do you turn to?” says Lusis, who is justifiably proud of the work her grassroots organization continues to do. “We are that agency that can help.”
For teacher Lindsay Dell, that help benefits the kids who come to St. Mark’s School each morning without enough food to fuel their bodies and brains, as well as the kids who help them and the teachers who are committed to ensuring they get a quality education.
“A child who doesn’t have a proper breakfast is cranky, restless and unable to focus,” she says. “The Grade 6 kids learn that the donation of their time is valuable and, of course, the teachers love having a class of focused kids ready to learn. It makes such a big difference for all of us.”