The Rose Garden Hospice has officially met their fundraising goal after a donation from Malcolm Jenkins of Canadian Tire on Friday.
Jenkins donated $100,000 to top up the Hospice’s 2 X 6 fundraiser and push the hospice past their $4 million fundraising goal.
The 2 X 6 fundraiser was a partnership with Econo Lumber where customers could buy planks of lumber as a way to support the Hospice. The fundraiser was done through the Rose Garden Hospice website.
“This tops up out fundraiser and gets us well over our goal, so that’s exciting,” Rose Garden Hospice Association fundraising chair Marina Mitchell said.
The $100,000 purchased the last 100 2 X 6s in their fundraiser and moved them over their goal.
“We are at our goal, we have committed dollars of just over $4.3 million, very exciting,” Mitchell said.
The building is progressing on the site at a rapid pace. Mitchell said the building has really been making progress since the weather improved.
“The walls are going up at the Hospice as we speak, so that’s exciting and probably by next week I am sure we will see a nice shell,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell is the daughter of Rose Daschuk, who the facility is named for. Daschuk’s passing showed the family just how important it was to have a facility where people could receive patient-centered end-of-life care in a home-like environment that meets the physical, emotional, cultural and spiritual needs of the client, their family and their friends.
This was the final donation for Jenkins in a series that began more than five years ago.
“We said we would give a hand,” Jenkins explained. “We said at the beginning that to give a sort of baseline or something to set an example, we would give $500,000 and give $100,000 a year for five years, and how we would give it is in chunks like matching Toffee sales, matching show sales and things that would motivate people to come out and see an event and bring out big numbers and they would become aware of the Hospice.
Jenkins said that the funds served a double purpose of raising money for the Hospice and raising awareness so other people would donate.
“You will see in the results with the selling of the beams, I think $300,000 was raised by people matching for $1,000 a piece the beams that were going to go into the building and that was the final closeout,” Jenkins said.
The final push put Canadian Tire well over $500,000 in total donations in support of the Hospice.
“That makes us the number one donor and the reason we are number one donor is because we have thousands and thousands of people who shop in our store. If they didn’t do it, we wouldn’t be able to do it. It’s redirecting their funds and I thank them for doing it,” Jenkins said.
His reason for his continuing support of the hospice comes back to personal experience.
“I lost my wife 10 years ago and she was in palliative in the hospital on the fifth floor and was looked after wonderfully,” Jenkins explained.
He said that despite the excellent care end of life in a hospital is not conducive to spending your final times in peace and solitude.
Jenkins gave the example of England where hospice care is a standard with over 1,000 in the country.
“You don’t use hospitals as warehouses for people who are near death. This is a dignified, classy way of allowing people to have peace and quiet served by nurses who are specially trained in this and they are allowed to have time to be with their parents and their loved ones rather than being in sort of an urban environment where you have lots of people going up the corridor,” he said.
michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
