Students fundraise for hospital equipment
Several Salmon Arm Secondary students have planned an online charity auction to help fundraise for a new CT scanner and mammography unit for Shuswap Lake General Hospital.
Elias Cox, and Karver Smith – with help from friends Justice Skelhorne and Ashleigh Nadin – have joined forces with Shuswap Lake Hospital Foundation and EZ Rock’s Have a Heart Radiothon to support the charity auction, with all proceeds going to the campaign.
“The reason we chose the Shuswap Lake Hospital Foundation was due to the recent pandemic, and its effect on the demand for healthcare. We were also aware that Dancing with the Shuswap Stars was cancelled this year. Due to that, we wanted to provide some extra support.”
Elias Cox
“What’s more, both Karver and I have had to travel from the local hospital to a more distant one, and since the CT Scanner is the #1 cause of travelling to a further hospital, we wanted to reduce how many people have to travel. Plus, the people at the Shuswap Hospital Foundation are very easy to work with and provide plenty of support,” explains Elias on behalf of the group.
“Preparation took a lot of time. We started preparing back in December of last year. The first half of it was the actual project process; talking the event over, planning it, and setting up a slideshow presentation for our marks. The next step was harder. We quickly realized we did not have the resources to achieve every pipedream we had, nor did we have the website and poster development skills we would need. The first thing we did was contact the Shuswap Hospital Foundation and bounced our idea off them. They gave us important feedback, which sharpened our vision and helped us to make our ideas a reality. We also partnered with two students from the school, Justice Skelhorne and Ashleigh Nadin. Justice designed our website, and Ashleigh designed our poster.”
“The auction itself has been going very well so far. The planning and sponsoring hit a few snags since neither of us had our own (working) cars. But we eventually gathered over 40 donations, with a combined estimated value of over $3000. We also received a very generous $1,000 donation from Fair Realty. We were surprised by how many people jumped at the chance to help us. Between the SHF’s support, EZ Rock’s consistent interviews, and a lot of our friends spreading news of us via word of mouth, this is a lot less our auction than it is everyone who has helped us along the way. We are amazed by how helpful and generous this community can be when we band together.”
“It was interesting to learn the ins and outs of a portion of the real world. The organizational skills to deal with new unexpected challenges were important to learn quickly, such as how difficult it would be to run a website, and how to present ourselves professionally to customers and companies. The other thing we learned was that everything will be more work and more problems than initially expected. We learned quite a lot about the responsibilities needed to facilitate such a large event. All in all, planning this auction has been both a fun and challenging experience, and we are very excited to see the results.”
The auction can be found at: https://www.salmonarmcharityauction.ca and the Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/SACharityAuction/
All items are generously donated by local businesses to help raise funds for charity.
The students took this on as part of their capstone graduation project (which replaced grad transitions when B.C.’s graduation program was updated a few years ago).
For those unfamiliar, a capstone project is a multidisciplinary project that serves as a culminating experience for graduating students. Capstone projects can take on many forms, but most are in-depth inquiries that conclude in a final project, presentation, or performance. Students will be asked to select a topic that interests them, a potential profession, or a social problem that interests them, research that subject, journal findings or experiences, develop a portfolio, create a final product representing their learning (a paper, short film, or multimedia presentation, for example), and present their project to a panel of teachers, experts, and community members.
Capstone projects are designed to have students think critically and creatively, solve challenging problems, and develop skills such as communication, public speaking, research skills, media literacy, teamwork, planning, self-efficacy, self-regulation, and goal setting —i.e. skills that will help prepare them for postsecondary school, modern careers, and adult life. The projects will be mostly interdisciplinary, in the sense that they require students to apply skills or investigate issues across many different subject areas.
The capstone components are an opportunity for students to further develop and showcase their strengths, passions, and learning journey. As a celebration of their learning journey, the capstone is a place where students are encouraged to share successes both in school and out of school, including their reflections on core competency development, their contributions and aspirations, and their plans for post-graduation. Each student’s capstone project is unique and can take many different forms, depending on student needs and interests and the opportunities available in local school communities.