Red Express provides holiday joy for families
Businesses donate toys to CUPS kids
Imagine what it would feel like not to have the money to buy your children gifts at Christmas. Imagine the stress and the pain and the sorrow of knowing that on Christmas morning, instead of watching your little tykes bound down the stairs full of excitement and expectation, you will be fretting as to how to offset their disappointment and sadness when they realize that there is nothing under the tree.
“When you can’t afford to buy your children gifts, Christmas is a very stressful and depressing time,” says Carlene Donnelly, executive director at CUPS. “As a parent, it can make you feel like a failure.”
Donnelly is also in charge of CUPS One World Child Development Centre, which provides support for low-income families in the form of preschool and kindergarten programs, plus parent education, crisis counselling, health care and other services needed to help struggling families reach their full potential.
But for the families at CUPS, all of whom earn less than the federal low-income level, Christmas is once again becoming a time of celebration thanks to Red Express, a new initiative spearheaded by local entrepreneur Tyler Chisholm and his wife Fionna.
“Being together as a family at Christmas and creating those memories and everybody having a good time — I think that is very, very important,” says Chisholm.
He came up with the idea for Red Express five years ago, around the same time he started his advertising agency ClearMotive Marketing Group.
“I was writing Christmas cards to clients and the first year it was OK and then the next year I was writing 500 cards and thinking this is ridiculous. Is this really meaningful? And then I thought, maybe there is a different approach.”
So, the next year Chisholm abandoned the Christmas cards and gift baskets and instead used the funds budgeted for client giving for gifts for the children at the Alberta Children’s Hospital. He designed an e-newsletter chronicling the initiative, added photos and good wishes for the season and sent it out to his clients.
As Christmas Eve approached, Chisholm and his staff hand-delivered the gifts to the hospital full of excitement, their hearts brimming with the giving spirit.
“It ended up being a little anticlimactic. The staff at the hospital said, ‘Thank you’ and asked us to put the gifts in the corner with the rest,” recalls Chisholm, who really wanted to see the impact on the children.
That’s when he started to research charities.
“I wanted something more tangible — where I could see the effect from A to B,” says Chisholm, who found out about CUPS through a friend.
When it opened its doors more than two decades ago, CUPS was one of the first agencies in the city with a mandate to help “the whole family” — physically, emotionally and mentally.
“Literally, we are a one-stop shop with expertise in three main domains — health, education and housing,” Donnelly says.
With two early learning child development centres in place — One World for kids aged four to six and Early Years for children from birth to three years of age — CUPS targets kids and families in crisis.
“All of the kids get a developmental and educational assessment and almost 99 per cent of them code under the Canadian average when they first come to us,” says Donnelly. “But after a year in our programs they are at least on par, and then we go from there to make gains above and beyond.”
Most families refer themselves to the CUPS program and most stay involved for the long haul.
“What we are really trying to do is keep families stable by getting them affordable housing (CUPS owns four apartment buildings and has established solid relationships with affordable housing agencies and landlords), and providing them programing that applies specifically to their situation: parenting skills, life skills, budgeting, communication, whatever it is we address all of the social issues in the home.”
Many of the kids stay in the CUPS learning centres for the full six years.
In 2009, Chisholm’s different holiday approach took on a life of its own, organically evolving into Red Express, which is a holiday season campaign asking local businesses to replace the tradition of client Christmas cards and gift baskets with a donation to CUPS for the purchase of Christmas gifts. The twist on the initiative is this: the parents of CUPS kids get to take the gifts home, wrap them, put them under the tree and give them to their kids at Christmas.
“Red Express is changing lives. It is allowing these families to create fun memories,” says Donnelly.
As part of the process, donating companies can utilize the design prowess of ClearMotive to create a unique holiday e-newsletter, complete with photos of its staff giving out gifts at CUPS.
For more information on Red Express, please visit redexpress.ca. You can donate through the website (be sure to watch the video) or you can contact Tyler Chisholm directly at tyler@clearmotive.ca.
To learn more about the CUPS One World Child Development Centre, visit cupscalgary.com.