Success Stories

Working Together in Alberta

Sundre is a small town located 130 km NW of Calgary, surrounded by a large rural community. Its population is 2500 in the town, and a total of 5300 includes the rural area surrounding the town. It is an isolated community being the last town west before the foothills and mountains. The nearest towns are small and at least 45 km away. Farming, logging, and oil/gas industry are the largest employers. Over the past 3 years, the farming and ranching families have suffered financially as a result of drought, grasshoppers, and the decline in the beef industry. These hardships are particularly becoming noticeable in the farming children attending the school.

River Valley School in Sundre, AB currently offers a School Snack program 3 days a week.  This program was initiated in 2002 and has been funded by BFL in 2002, 2003 and 2006. Originally, the program started small, offering a snack to all the 800 students just twice per month. Over the past few years, they have fundraised $21,000 in order to provide a brand new kitchen to the school which has just opened this Fall, 2005. This will allow them to offer a snack 4 times per week in 2006, with their final goal being a 5 day a week snack program.

The program is entirely volunteer- driven and staffed, and 111volunteers work for it. 46 volunteers are involved each day that the snack is served, and they include the parents, students, seniors, teachers and community members.

The Nutrition Society, which was formed at the outset of the program to allow for fundraising, has forged partnerships with United Way, Mountainview FCSS, the town of Sundre, the local grocery and pharmacy, the Foothills Seniors Lodge, the local Legion and Royal Purple Club.

The snack costs an average of 60 cents per day, and milk is included with each snack. The volunteers raise $40,000.00 a year to cover the cost of providing milk and a snack 3 days a week to 740 kids.

Their success comes from their volunteers. They invite people to choose from a list of possible volunteer activities, some of which include:

• Picking up baked items from the grocery store
• Filling the snack containers for each class
• Shopping for other items like yogourt, fruit, etc., and delivering this to the school
• Washing snack containers
• Labelling and checking snack containers, student count, etc. on a bi-weekly basis
• Delivering any left over milk to the Learning Centre and High School
• Completing grant applications
• Researching new funding possibilities