How It All Began

It is impossible to have a successful charity event alone. You can’t raise money without donors. You can’t advertise without media support (paid or sponsored). You can’t have an event if nobody comes. It takes community to make it work.

I have been working for The Beer Store for the past 17 years. I have been bottle drive team captain for the last three drives at my store on Walker Road in Windsor.

My friend and colleague, Nick Russell, has also been a team captain at another store in Windsor for those three years, and we have both enjoyed varying degrees of success in the venture.

We have really adopted the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society as our own cause, and the bottle drive just seems like the best way to show our support.

This year something different happened. It started off the same way it has been in previous years - we got the company memo that team captains were needed and they should start recruiting volunteers.

Nick and I stepped up like we always have. We started to canvas the neighbourhood for volunteers and for food donations. Nick put up his Facebook event page again. I think that’s where it started. I was going to post my own event, but it occurred to us that we would be better off having one event page than separate ones. People would be more likely to go if they knew they could go to ANY store, after all. From there it just seemed to make sense.

Let’s work together! Why compete? Does it really matter who collects more donations? Would it not be better if we worked to help each other, instead of racing to grab resources for just one store?

I was asked by our union representative to come and meet with the Bottle Drive committee because of the ideas and success my store has had in previous years. One of the ideas that came up was having a coordinator for each community. This would help solve some problems with getting volunteers and support those who needed it.

Well, then we thought why can’t we start doing that ourselves -we’re already supporting each other? At this point, I was working on getting party supplies and hot dog toppings for both of us, and Nick had already gotten two radio stations to agree to promote both of our stores’ barbecues. We were well on our way with our stores so why not see what we could do for the others.

We discussed it with our District Manager. He was very supportive of our ideas. We were able to get a few volunteers out to other stores, including a team captain for a store that did not have one yet. We were able to promote multiple store events. We also got sponsors together to have a volunteer raffle in Windsor District. Stores were informed ahead of time that prizes were being collected. Volunteers could win prizes from Kelsey’s, Rona, Things Engraved, and from many other retailers.

We also had fire trucks visit several Windsor stores to help out. Teaming up got us some fantastic results and it was also very rewarding.

I think our only regret was that we started so late in the game. We helped each other a great deal and we helped a few other stores out a little, but we have a plan. It was Nick’s idea really. Stores would be encouraged to share their ideas, efforts, concerns and needs with the team for the benefit of the whole district.

Other employees had already indicated that they would like to participate. We are hoping to get other volunteers from the district to join the team. A “District Coordination Team” wouldn’t really work without support from all its individual communities and support from everyone is exactly what we are trying to achieve...