Commerce students brighten the holidays – raise $10K+ for Kingston kids

More than 150 underprivileged children across Kingston enjoyed a more joyous holiday season thanks to gifts from Commerce students donated to the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in December.

Dubbed the Holiday Hope campaign, it was the brainchild of Adam Mitchell (Comm’11) and Spenser Heard (Comm’10, ComSoc President) to give back to the local
community. Groups of students signed up to sponsor a family in need of a helping hand and, through a partnership with the CAS, were provided with a holiday wish list. Each group was given a $100 starting fund covered by generous donations from the Queen’s Commerce Society, QSB, the NetImpact Support Centre, and Oil Thigh Designs. The expectation was for each group to match the $100 original funding, but many far exceeded it.

At the end of the campaign, a holiday tree in the Atrium was almost completely buried by hundreds of wrapped gifts. When the CAS collected the holiday haul at a ceremony in Goodes Hall in early December, the Kingston Whig-Standard covered the ‘feel good’ story. “We have never, never seen anything like this,” Yvonne Cooper of the CAS was quoted as saying. “It’s overwhelming.”

“We’ve been given so much privilege and opportunity here from Queen’s, so to be able to get in touch with our student body and provide them with the opportunity to give back is where [the idea] really came from,” Adam Mitchell explained in the Whig story.