By Emily R. Zarevich, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Crate after crate packed high with quality food. A monetary fundraising number, swelling to the size of a blimp. A league’s worth of students and young athletes with boundless energy and tremendous hearts. A school gymnasium transformed into a buzzing hub of charitable activity. This was Nelson High School on November 20, 2024. Twenty-one rep teams and 15 house league teams from the Burlington Barracudas. 34 Eagles Red teams and 8 Junior Eagles teams from the Burlington Eagles. In the spirit of amicable competitiveness for The Gift of Giving Back program, they collected enough food to keep local bellies well-fed for months.
The Gift of Giving Back organization has been leading an enterprise of benevolent endeavours with Halton’s young people at its centre since the year 2005. The non-profit organization works with youth athletic associations and schools, entreating students to spend their time collecting food donations and raising funds when they’re not in the classroom, out on the field, or (of course) on the ice. Jean Longfield, the founder and chair of Gift of Giving Back, claims it all started out small, but with big intentions to teach the young people of Halton valuable life lessons.
“We’re in our nineteenth year now, and of course, we’re going to our twentieth year. We started out basically with a little red wagon in the neighbourhood. My son was part of the Burlington Eagles hockey team and as parents, we all felt that our kids were very spoiled,” says Longfield with good humour. “They didn’t understand how fortunate they were to live in this amazing city. It’s just the greatest place to grow up. They didn’t understand how lucky they were, so we wanted to do something that would teach them something about giving back to the community. It was the responsibility of all of us to make our community better. We wanted our children to know that it’s not a choice. It’s an obligation to do something for somebody without the explicit idea that they’re going to get rewarded for it.”
“The Gift of Giving Back isn’t as well-known as we would like it to be,” Longfield goes on. “This drive is so important to the community. It’s staggering, how important it is. It feeds our community until the spring, and together with Oakville, it will feed all of Halton until spring. We want people to be aware, when the kids knock on their door or drop off a blue bag, they aren’t soliciting for themselves or their sports group to get new uniforms or go on a trip to Florida. They’re doing it for us. To make our community a better, safer, and happier place to live.”
It was team against team in the arena that was the Nelson High School gymnasium. Students in full hockey gear eagerly darted around, as if they were on skates, in a race to fill the crates with food as fast as they could. The energy in the room was thunderous. A scoreboard mounted on the wall, similar to a hockey scoreboard, kept careful track of each team’s monetary value of food collected for the cause. The calculation formula was simple: 1 pound of food equaled $3.54. Besides the satisfaction of being generous to other members of their community, being top of the scoreboard was also ample motivation for the kids to perform well.
Nelson High School’s own older students were also involved in the event’s operations. Student council members Olivia Willson, Nissa Ozgur, and Lillian Le Marechiel, an ambitious trio of driven, aspiring politicians, are proud to be part of a course of action that is helping their community thrive. The three also took the opportunity to practice being in proactive leadership roles.
“Me and Nissa have not been in class at all today,” says Willson, who is in grade 12. “We’ve been down here in the gym. We’ve been pulling food from the bins and making them into bags. We have a list that we’ve been checking off.”
“We also did a lot of the organizing and just making sure that classes come down and do their part. It’s a collaborative thing. We want everyone involved,” says Ozgur, who is also in grade 12.
“I got to get classes to come to me and weigh their food. I told them how to organize their food themselves, and they got to be volunteers like we were,” says Le Marechiel, a grade 10 student.
At around 7:30 p.m., Longfield hosted a special ceremony that included an array of enthusiastic guest speakers. Local hockey coaches and representatives from some of the Gift of Giving Back’s beneficiaries, such as Feed Halton, Food for Life, Salvation Army, and the Compassion Society of Halton all had the same thing to say to the assembled do-gooders: thank you. Mayor Marianne Weed Ward also presented a speech, in which she continued the night’s theme of friendly, good-natured competition with a spirited challenge delivered to Oakville’s mayor, Rob Burton, who is also overseeing the major food collection campaign in the neighbouring city of Oakville.
“This is a challenge to my fellow mayor in Oakville, that we are going out-collect you, and you’ll have to wear a [Burlington] Barracudas jersey if we outdo you!” Meed Ward ribbed her fellow city administrator. “He’s going to have to wear that jersey because we are going to beat him, and I know tonight is going to be amazing!”
And so it was. Ai-Ri Brown, one of the Gift of Giving Back board members and organizers, reports an outstanding $863,062 worth (at least) of foodstuff and monetary collections donated by the efforts of the athletes, the students, and their families. The following day, the packed-up food was shipped straight to Feed Halton to be distributed to places of need. Burlington is more than successfully shaping its youth to be exemplary when it comes to generosity, productivity, empathy, and community service. Jean Longfield’s vision is being realized.
