About the Fund

BUILDING ON A 30-YEAR TRADITION

By Shelley Fralic

When inner-city school teacher Carrie Gelson put out her heartwrenching notice in September that her students at Admiral Seymour elementary in Vancouver were arriving at school hungry and in need of warm clothing, she touched a nerve with Vancouver Sun readers, who responded by generously donating goods and funds to the school.

Her story, which has echoes throughout inner-city schools all over Metro Vancouver, also prompted The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund to launch a special fundraising project called Adopt-a-School.

Today, as we begin a series of stories reflecting the unmet needs of children in inner-city schools throughout the region, and as we look to our readers to help us make the lives of those children better, we are continuing a legacy that began with this newspaper three decades ago.

In 1981, then-publisher Clark Davey decided to use the paper’s influence and integrity – and printing press – to do something special for children in need in British Columbia.

He determined that if we combined our talented journalistic staff and our ongoing social commitment to the community to inform readers about children living in poverty, about disabled, abused and at-risk children in need right here in our own backyard, then we could not only raise awareness, but money, too, to help those children.

And thus was born The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund, a non-profit charity that raises funds through reader donations – including our annual Christmas campaign – and, in turn, disburses grants through an endowment to hundreds of children’s charities throughout the province.

Readers’ generosity – your generosity – has been overwhelming, and humbling, from the beginning.

In the past three decades, readers have donated close to $11 million to the fund. We have $2.5 million in an untouchable endowment fund, and today use the balance and the interest generated by that nest egg to issue twice-yearly grants to more than 900 B.C. children’s charities, from summer camps for disabled kids and subsidies for children living in poverty to autism programs and therapeutic riding for disabled children.

To date, the fund has granted $6.8 million to children’s charities in B.C., and has also issued large cheques to kick-start long-standing projects like the Canuck Place hospice and the KidSafe program for at-risk inner-city kids in Vancouver.

Our board of directors, which includes Pacific Newspaper Group president and publisher Kevin Bent, works diligently to ensure that every penny donated by readers goes directly to B.C. children and the programs that help them.

In 2003, we partnered with the Vancouver Foundation to help us administer our annual spring and fall grants, relying on the foundation’s expert advisory committee to guide us in funding programs to improve the physical, mental and emotional health of B.C. children.

In 2008, we awarded a special one-time $500,000 Legacy Grant, the fund’s largest-ever, to the Children of the Street society, a Coquitlam-based educational outreach charity founded by Diane Sowden in 1995 and designed to teach schoolchildren about sexual exploitation, street life, drug and alcohol addiction, Internet safety and the sex trade.

With Adopt-a-School, our goal is to raise not only money and awareness to address the needs in individual schools as identified by their educators – the fund will match every penny donated by readers – but also to act as a conduit so that Sun readers can immediately donate goods such as coats and shoes and gloves directly to those schools and students who need them most as we head into winter.

The Vancouver Sun’s centuryold history tells a story of charitable commitment to British Columbians, dating back to the Santa Claus Fund of the 1920s, the Cup of Milk and House of Hope campaigns in the 1960s, the Tiny Tim and Christmas Cheer funds, both of which operated in the 1970s, and, of course, The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund.

Today, as we launch Adopt-a-School, we are once again asking readers to open their hearts and wallets so that we can continue our legacy of helping B.C.’s neediest kids.