Festival of Trees donates $15,000 to youth groups
Posted Feb 2, 2012 By Scott Pettigrew
Click to Enlarge
EMC Lifestyles -Tweed - Representatives from 15 different youth groups and organizations gathered in the municipal council chambers to accept a donation from the Tweed Festival of Trees steering committee January 24. 
In this large group are representatives from 15 different youth groups in Tweed as well as the volunteers who help put on the Festival of Trees who donated a total of $15,000 to the various youth organizations. Missing from this photo is steering committee member Shelly Bateman. Photo: Scott Pettigrew
Committee chair Barb Gunning spoke before handing over the cheques.
"It is nice to see so many organizations come to the municipal office but it is especially nice to see so many young people here who are going to benefit from the $15,000 we were able to raise. When we started on this adventure in 2004 the steering committee did set some guidelines for the use of the profits from the festival and the first one was that the money raised from the festival would be donated within a year of the festival having taken place which is why we are here today, we are here to present the profits from the eighth annual Festival of Trees.
"We set other guidelines in that we want to support a wide range of interests and age groups for the groups participating. Some years have had the donation go to one large project so that we have infrastructure that benefits the community in the long term, but in the years where there is not an ongoing project, then we divide the profits among various organizations which we did last year and we also did in our first year. We have 15 groups who are going to benefit, some are sports organizations that help keep our kids healthy in mind and body and those organizations are the Tweed and District Figure Skating Club, the Gateway Horse Riders Club, Tweed Minor Softball Association, Tweed Soccer Association, Tweed Minor Hockey Association, Land O' Lakes Curling Club (to support their youth curling program), and the Erin Palmateer fund-raising committee (to support the summer program they do in conjunction with the YMCA). We also wanted to support other organizations with other interests our youth may have and some of those groups are the Hastings County 4-H Association, the Tweed Summer Youth Theatre that is held in the park each year, the Tweed and Area Arts Council (to be used toward the youth theatre camp they run), the Gateway Community Health Centre Jazz Youth Ensemble, the Queensborough Community Centre (that offers summer youth programs to some of the children in the hamlet) and the Tweed Hungerford Agricultural Society toward a speaker system for their youth dances. You can see everything here is toward supporting the youth of our municipality but we recognize children need food in their tummies and a warm coat to keep their bodies healthy as well. Keeping that in mind, we are also donating to the Please Keep Me Warm organization and to the Salvation Army Food Bank. We are pleased to be able to support so many organizations and it is due to the hard work of the steering committee volunteer ladies."
blog comments powered by Disqus
