Projects for 2020
Niagara Falls Community Outreach Soup Kitchen
LN 2020 helped support The Niagara Falls Community Outreach Soup Kitchen – an independent charitable organization serving over 42,000 nutritious meals annually to those in need in our community.
Working closely with the Board of Directors, our team implemented organizational and fundraising strategies to help strengthen the organization’s commitment to our community. We are also hopeful to host a charity event in 2021, which had been originally planned for August 2020. We are proud to announce that one of our team members has been elected to join the Board of Directors to continue on with the great leadership demonstrated.
Food4Kids Niagara
Leadership Niagara worked with Food4Kids Niagara again in 2020. After the successes of last year’s social media strategy, Food4Kids was looking for a new fundraising campaign to increase community awareness of the organization throughout Niagara and to gather new donors to work towards its goal of expanding to more schools in the community.
The LN team worked with Food4Kids to create a one-day event called Food Fight Niagara. This event encouraged businesses to gather donations through whatever fundraising method worked best for them with the top fundraiser being presented with a championship belt. Though Covid-19 prevented the team from running the event on May 1st as planned, the materials created for Food4Kids will make this event possible for years to come.
Our goal was to propose a new creative “outside the box” fundraising event for the YWCA Niagara Region to replace their No Fixed Address event.
The hope was that this new idea could become the signature event for the YWCA that can be sustained for multiple years. The objective was to raise awareness of the YWCA, raise funds for the YWCA and become a recognizable event in the community. After brainstorming and communications with our project partner, it was decided that the YWCA will host a Wine and Chocolate Run/Walk.
As a team, we created an event strategic plan and critical path with a timeline and step-by-step checklist of tasks that the YWCA can use in the future to plan and implement this new fundraising event.
Third Space Café
Our group intended to work with Third Space Café to aid in the development of a number of organizational and governance supports. In doing so, we hoped to empower the organization to create sustainable business and governance practices to promote long-term success.
We completed an environmental analysis, an operational review, and began preliminary work to engage in community consultation which sought to help inform a future strategic planning process for the cafe.
Due to unforeseen events, most notably the departure of their Executive Director and COVID-19, most of our project remains unfinished, however, we hope to pass on what we have so far completed and our original plans to next year’s class.
Indigenous Men’s Healing Centre of Niagara
Indigenous Men’s Healing Centre Niagara (IMHCN) is a proposed not-for-profit providing trauma-informed services with indigenous culture and tradition at its core. The organization is in the very early stages of development with a large number of projects that need assistance.
Our group was able to help bring structure to the organization by prioritizing and executing tasks; expanding stakeholder relations by introducing people from our own networks to the project, and our biggest achievement of the year – submitting incorporation status paperwork.
Additionally, we assisted with the development of the business plan and charitable status paperwork, community presentations, logo development, review of property maps and architectural designs, and bank account set-up.
