Helping Our Northern Neighbours (HONN) (Belleville, Ontario
Chapter)
Helping Our Northern Neighbours Facebook site, opened in August,
2014 by a fellow Canadian in British Columbia. Jennifer Gwilliam is the founder
and head Administrator for the main Facebook site. HONN is a dedicated group to
helping people in Canada’s north and trying to ensure that no one has to go
hungry because they can’t afford food. Through the group Feeding Our Family
HONN is becoming educated about the prices that the residents of Canada’s
northern territory, Nunavut, are being forced to pay for food and other goods.
While a major change in the system at the governmental level
needs to happen, this will take time, and in the meantime HONN would like to do
something to help. People in the south decided that they would like to share
with our neighbours in the north by sending boxes of food and other items.
There are many things we all can do to help enact a change, which are suggest
on the Feeding My Family page, but this will take time and the people are
hungry NOW.
In light of only four months our main Facebook page has gone
viral. A news article hit the Hunnington post about what HONN does and exploded
with everyday Canadians wanting to help. In two days of the article hitting the
news the Facebook page encountered 3,000 new members, in six days over 10,000!
Overloaded with private messages of outraged people asking
to sponsor a family, to our northern neighbours looking to be sponsored were
just some of the private messages Jennifer had to deal with. The process of
matching donors to families became a large scale challenge, however a
successful one.
I am now the Administrator of the Helping Our Northern
Neighbours (Belleville, ON Chapter), currently working on my 40th
family in Nunavut. I use the one-by-one approach.
For more information on how you can help please visit
No comments:
Post a Comment