With the holiday season firmly behind us, Toronto gears up for a cold and snowy winter and a little charity to warm the heart of dogooders across the city! Windfall launches their annual Wear White 4 Windfall awareness and fundraising campaign this month and invites you to join Toronto celebrities such as Dina Pugliese, Anne Mroczkowski, and Traci Melchor, in the fight against poverty. On January 27th, 2011 Torontonians are encouraged to show their support for WW4W by sporting their finest white attire. Windfall will be hosting various events in the days leading up to the official WW4W awareness day which you can read about here. Side note: If you’re on twitter do follow @hmcanada who generously promised to donate $1 to Windfall for every new follower between now and Jan 27.
Background: Windfall is a Toronto based charity that was founded in 1991 to assist homeless and emergency shelters meet their clients’ needs for new clothing and basic needs items. Windfall services the Greater Toronto Area by providing partner agencies such as shelters, reception centres for refugees, transitional and supportive housing facilities, community centres, and job training and placement programs with new clothing and basic need items from various retailers. They’ve reached thousands and thousands of people in need over the years, and have fittingly won awards for their efforts having grown from collecting and distributing 28,000 items in 1993 to over 900,000 items valuing more than $28 million to those in need last year.
Numbers aside, it’s the spirit of Windfall that is most interesting. A little research shows that the founders of Windfall are in fact the same two fabulous ladies, Joan Clayton and Ina Andre, who founded Second Harvest; another amazing Toronto charitable organization that redistributes perishable food to social service agencies. The common thread in the fabric of these organizations is that they both recognize the opportunity to avoid waste and provide for those in need. Windfall and Second Harvest both capitalize on something that’s always made sense: ‘waste note, want not’.
doGood. feelGood. liveGood.
-Team thinkGood.
Tags: @hmcanada, H&M Canada, Ina Andre, Joan Clayton, Wear White for Windfall, Windfall