Spreading Warmth to Northern Residents

Congratulations Ferris Lions Club for ensuring warmth for our children. It definitely takes a village to raise a child and you’ve shown us how quickly something so vital can be undertaken and completed! Thank you Lions John Marcil for sharing this experience! Please see Lion John’s account of this project below.

By Lion John Marcil

As a Lion’s Club we received many requests to help and it’s not easy to choose which requests to support. In November 2019, the Ferris Lions learned of an opportunity to help a number of children in a small community in Northern Ontario this winter.

The opportunity was to provide winter jackets, scarves, toques and mittens to elementary students in Pickle Lake, ON. With the support of many partners and the community of North Bay at large, within three weeks we collected 5 full hockey bags of warm outerwear for these children. In total we collected 250 pairs of mittens and gloves, 160 toques, 50 pairs of socks, 53 scarves, 11 pairs of snow pants 20 infant snowsuits, 5 pairs of infant boots, 37 winter jackets and 300 chapsticks.

Pickle Lake is 1,618.5 km away from North Bay, ON that’s an 18 hour and 45 minute drive. This remote community is the farthest community you can drive to by road in the remote areas of the north.

Now that we had this massive amount of items, how were we going to get them all the way to Pickle Lake? Well with a number of very dedicated Santa helpers the five enormous hockey bags traveled from one stop to the next and changed hands several times over the period of a week until finally arrived in the school gymnasium.

This just goes to show that when you have a strong group of Lion’s members , big or small, and partners, any project can be successful. It doesn’t hurt to have a little Christmas Spirit working for you as well.

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