The Canadian Cancer Society’s Relay For Life is coming to Nelson’s Lakeside Park on June 16. The annual event will once again draw in teams from around the region with the goal of raising money for cancer.
Leading up the event in Nelson, a group of Salmo youth have been working hard to raise money and raise awareness. Here is the story of Kirsten Faris, Mandy Huser and Lynsey Gray...
We are a group of high school students and our friends and family, and our team name is YOLO. It stands for You Only Live Once. As a team we are strong believers in living our lives to the fullest, and cancer is taking this opportunity away from our friends and family. This is why we chose YOLO.
At first it was overwhelming to see how many people were willing to donate to our Relay team.
Because it was our first time with relay, Mandy put our fundraising goal as $300. We quickly realized that we would be raising much more. We signed up for relay just a couple of weeks ago and already we have raised over $1,500!
We got the word out through Facebook and emails to our family and friends, asking for donations as well as asking them to join our team. We also invited Relay For Life representatives to make a presentation to our school in Salmo, which helped us recruit teammates.
When you do a fundraiser you see how many people really care about a good cause, and we think one of the reasons we raised so much in so little time is due to living in such a small community and having so many strong connections. Everyone is always willing to help each other. We can’t wait to see how much we end up raising.
Our fundraising ideas for the next couple weeks include asking different community groups for donations, and our friends are shaving their heads — they are donating $100 per head shaved, which is amazing. Five of them have shaved their heads so far and in total they have raised $700. We also had a bake sale.
We are really looking forward to relay day. All of us are especially looking forward to the luminary ceremony because we have put one of our moms and a friend’s mom name in, and Mandy will be putting her grandpa’s name on a luminary too. Mandy says she feels blessed to have the opportunity to be involved in such a day, and we are all so happy to be a part of this as participants and volunteers to help fight back against cancer.
We hope to see you at relay.
Register as a team, participant or volunteer at relaybc.ca today — it’s not too late. For more information call Stacey at 250-364-0403.