Social Responsibility

Here is a (slightly modified to remove some personal details) email that I just sent out to parents of the 24th Ottawa Beavers and Scouts. If you happen to be involved with the Scouting movement in Ottawa but are not a member of one of the below groups, yet would still like to get involved in this fundraiser, please feel free to contact me as we'd love to include you!

Otherwise if you just live in the area, please drop by and enjoy some hot chocolate, and make a donation to a good cause!

Last week I was sitting around doing nothing, as I often do, when I got to thinking about whether or not Haiti grows coffee, and if so, would I be helping out the situation there if I switched all of my coffee consumption over to it. So I did a quick search on my favorite coffee supply website, the Green Beanery, and found that Haiti does indeed grow coffee. And from the description provided, it even sounded like a pretty good bean, too!

Before I go any further I do want to say that I am not suggesting that Haiti needs trade instead of aid, because nothing could be further from the truth. Right now Haiti needs a massive amount of aid to rebuild after this disaster. But in order to be self-sustaining, it will also need to engage in some amount of international trade, and it seemed to me that switching my coffee consumption to Haitian coffee would be a pretty easy way for me to help out in that area.

With the devastating earthquake in Haiti, and all the talk of making donations there, I thought I would write a bit on why I will not be donating money to Haiti. In the process I'll tell a bit about where I do like to donate money. While some of what I'm about to write may seem cold, I hope you will not judge me for it just as I will not judge you for the donations you make to the charitable organisations of your choosing. I don't really think there is a wrong way to donate to charity, as long as you are doing it regularly, and ideally putting some thought into it. The latter is why I will not be donating to Haiti - I've put a lot of thought into my donations, and this simply does not fit into the "donation profile" that I have chosen for me. What you choose as right for you, is up to you of course.

Shortly after moving to Ottawa about a dozen years ago is when I first started making charitable donations of any meaningful amount, and at the time it was in the form of the Ottawa Food Bank. Every time we went grocery shopping, we'd pick up a generous amount of extras and drop them into the box they had at the grocery store. It was easy to do, and easy to remember, and it was also the earliest of my inklings of what would become my "donation profile". But more on that in a bit. It was after a few years of doing this, that a co-worker pointed out to me that with the amount of groceries I donate every week, it added up to quite a bit of money, and I'd actually be better off donating a cheque to the food bank and getting a tax receipt back. "Hey", I thought, "not a bad idea!". So that's what I did for the next while.

This week's Beaver meeting involved a lesson on trees, along with an associated craft. To prepare, I went around the neighbourhood picking leaves off the trees. While many had fallen, there were still lots left - some not even turned colour yet. As far as softwoods go, I only took in 2 samples - a small clipping from the spruce in our backyard, and another small clipping from our cedar hedge. The main reason for this was that the craft involved the leaves of the hardwoods. Speaking of which, I managed to get a good number of leaves from White Oak, Sugar Maple, Manitoba Maple (which I learned when looking it up, is actually a 'real' maple, contrary to popular belief), Red Maple, Corkscrew Willow, Service Berry (really nice red all year long), Mountain Ash (Dogberry), Chestnut, and yet another type of maple whose name I could not find in the short time I had to look it up.

I started the talk with a few words about the importance of Nature in the Scouting movement, and reminded the boys that our Beaver Promise is to take care of the world. I also painted a wondrous picture for them and said that if you took an experienced Scout and blindfolded him, and dropped him anywhere in Canada, he'd be able to tell you where he is based on trees, and other vegetation and animals that he saw around him. As an example I then held up the piece of Cedar I had, and mentioned that in Nova Scotia, where I am from, cedars are very uncommon.

Last year my oldest son was hearing a lot of great stuff from his friends about Beavers, which here in Canada is the entry level into the Scouting movement - for 5 to 7 year olds. Unfortunately the Colony that his friends went (and still go) to meet on Thursday nights, and we already had something in that timeslot on a regular basis. So I went looking around and found another nearby colony that had been on hiatus for a couple of years because they had no leaders. They were trying to get back together and needed volunteers - so I volunteered!

That was last May. The process includes an interview, a police records check, and a number of other steps, but I had them all completed for September when the first meeting was to take place. The other night was our Colony's 2nd meeting, and it was a great success! There are 10 kids, and one of the other parents volunteered to be a leader as well, so we have things well underway.

There is a reason why talking on a cellphone while driving is illegal in Ontario, and I just got to witness it first-hand, as I do many times a week now that I'm unemployed and walk the kids back-and-forth to school a lot. There is one set of lights on their walk to school, and we were waiting at it about 10 minutes ago waiting for the crossing light to go green. I noticed the signal for the cars went yellow, then red. A guy in a crossover stationwagon / minivan with cellphone clearly held up to his left ear with his left hand, initially stops at the red light as I enter the crosswalk with my kids, but then calmly proceeds through it!

Ever since I was a kid, my dad taught me the importance of being a responsible citizen, and of being a part of the solution, not the problem. This will prove to be the most important part of his lasting legacy to me and eventually my kids, when he eventually passes on to the next world. In his day this need to get involved was expressed primarily through his life-long involvement with labour unions, though it was also expressed in a multitude of other ways. I recall once when I was about 11 or 12 finding a 20 dollar bill in a parking lot in Antigonish. As I was about to pocket the money, my pop suggested that it could possibly be the last 20 dollars of some poor person, and now they'd go without food for a while. Of course he was right - this could very-well have been the case. So we took it to the police station and turned it in there. Of course, when pop called them back a month later to see if anyone had claimed it, it seemed that someone on the police force wasn't as honest as pop and I because the money had not been claimed, but it was missing. But that's a story for another day. I also recall the time my brother bought a new pair of CCM Tacks (skates) at Canadian Tire. When he got home he realised the clerk had accidentally given him SuperTacks, but charged him the price of the less-expensive Tacks. Of course he went back and reported the problem, and exchanged the SuperTacks for Tacks.