Giving Tuesday puts focus on charity

Dec 1, 2016 | Life

Giving comes in all forms. You can give your time, donate or another other selfless act. (Courtesy of: Fypsucksyah)

Giving comes in all forms. You can give your time, donate or another other selfless act. (Courtesy of: Fypsucksyah)

By: Shaunte Sterling

First comes Black Friday and then Cyber Monday. Next comes Giving Tuesday.

It’s a day aimed at encouraging people to give to charity after spending the weekend shopping and getting holiday gifts.

Giving Tuesday is a chance to donate to a favourite charity, to give time to a food bank or even pay it forward buying someone else’s coffee.

Canada Helps is an online donation platform where they provide the fundraising tools for over 17,000 charities to fundraise for their cause.

Marking Associate Nicole Dansi sheds light on the importance of giving Tuesday.

“Giving Tuesday is all about kick starting charitable giving for the holiday season but we do it on a daily basis 365 days a year,” says Dansi.

She spends a lot of her personal time working with charitable organizations and finding new ways to give. Although November and December are known for the months of giving Dansi encourages everyone to try and do it throughout the year.

“Charities work on a daily basis to make ground on their cause whether it’s animal charities or food banks [we] help fill the gaps in society and in our community.”

Giving Tuesday is an uplifting day for the community.

One of the many organizations that participate in Giving Tuesday is Engage and Change. Their focus is homelessness in the GTA.

Jody Steinhauer, the founder of Engage and Change, says she is excited to be one of the organizations to be profiled by Canada Helps.

“[On Tuesday] at 5 a.m. we were handing out information kits about the homeless kits we hand out. We gave out gloves and all sorts of things,” says Steinhauer.

“We are hoping that everyone will go to the engage and change website and check out our stuff to help.”

There is a misconception that people think in the coldest day’s homeless people struggle the worse but that is incorrect. During the hottest days’ homeless people are known to die due to dehydration Steinhauer says.

“We encourage people to go online and make a donation of three dollars to the charity of their pick.”