This holiday season may look a little different but Free Form Fitness wants to help make the season bright for women in our community. For the first two weeks of December, we will be running a fundraiser in each of our 6 locations, and online through Facebook and Instagram and email to help raise money and awareness for the Ottawa chapter of The Shoebox Project for Women. Before we explain how this fundraiser will work, we want to tell you a little more about this year’s holiday charity-of-choice.
Shoebox Project:
“The Shoebox Project for Women, supported by Dream, collects and distributes gift-filled Shoeboxes to women impacted by homelessness in communities across Canada and the US. Each thoughtfully created and decorated Shoebox is filled with items valued at $50 that can enhance self-esteem and reduce feelings of isolation for women in need.” – Shoebox Project for Women Website
They started in 2011 delivering 400 boxes to homeless women across Canada. In 2019 they delivered close to 65,000 boxes across Canada and have raised more than 12 million dollars to help supply these boxes.
So what goes into the boxes?
In a normal year, the items and boxes would be donated by community members. A global pandemic has made this way of doing things impossible so The Shoebox Project has pivoted and adapted their fundraising efforts to the virtual world.
For this year’s fundraiser, they’re keeping it simple and asking for donations of $20 or more to help them provide gift cards to 3,000 women in our community. How much money will they need to raise? $45,000!
How we will be raising money for the event
We have a pretty ambitious goal of raising $5,000 for the Ottawa Chapter of The Shoebox Project for Women, so we’ve taken on not 1, not 2, but 3 ways to fundraise!
In-studio: Train the Trainer 2020 Reboot
This fundraiser was a huge hit in 2019 when we were running our Breast Cancer fundraiser. If you weren’t around then, the fundraiser worked like this:
- Every trainer was given a solo cup
- Clients could then drop a toonie (or more) into the trainer’s cup
- That client would then get that trainer to perform an exercise of their choosing
You all loved it! It seems the payback was something you were all waiting for! So we’ve decided to bring it back but give it a 2020 twist!
This year instead of each trainer having a cup, each cup will correspond to a specific 2020 event. You’ll find things like “Speaking Moistly”, “UFO’s”, and “4 Seasons Landscaping” as possible options. Each 2020 event will correspond to a specific exercise. Here’s the full list of events and exercises so you can plan your payback strategy:
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- R.I.P Kobe: 20 burpees
- Australian Wildfires: 1-minute wall-sit with 25lbs plate on your lap
- ImPEACHment: 20 deadlifts (with kettlebell)
- Lockdowns: 1-minute plank
- UFO’s: 20 kettlebell swings
- Speaking Moistly: 30s of battleropes
- Killer Hornets: 30s of pushups
- #BlackLivesMatter: 1-minute of jump-rope
- 4 Seasons Landscaping: Sled Push (1 plate) down and back
There is a minimum $2 donation to participate, but you are always welcome to donate more. If you aren’t comfortable donating physical money, there will be a QR code that you can use to donate to our online fundraiser.
Virtual: FFF Virtual Lottery
To ensure everyone can participate in a fun fundraiser, we’ve created a virtual lottery! Every week we’ll send out a link to clients where they can purchase their $5 virtual lottery ticket. You’ll receive your lottery ticket(s) by the end of the day, and we will do our virtual lottery draw every Thursday at 8:00 PM on Facebook (we’ll send out a reminder before the draw!)
Not on Facebook? No problem, we’ll be posting the draw to our Instagram page and emailing the winning numbers to you before the end of the day. We’ll also share the numbers with our location managers so they can tell you at your next session.
What can you win? We’ve put together a few prizes valued at anywhere from $150 – $250. The prize bundles will be announced each week when we open up ticket purchases.
Here’s the schedule for the lottery:
- First Draw: December 10th.
- Tickets are available from December 1st – December 9th.
- Second Draw: December 17th.
- Tickets are available from December 11 to December 16th
To join the mailing list, subscribe here.
Online Fundraising with Canada Helps
The Shoebox Project for Women handles all of their online donations through Canada Helps, so we have created a fundraising page using the same platform. Canada Helps is a smaller online fundraising platform and therefore the processing fees for each donation are much lower than they are for other major donation websites.
This link will be available on all of our social media pages via the linktree link in bio. The link will be included in every email update throughout the month and will be present in the form of QR codes in each location.
If you’d like to help us out, we invite you to copy and paste this link into your social media bios, or simply share it to your Facebook or LinkedIn newsfeeds.
https://www.canadahelps.org/en/pages/free-form-fitness-holiday-fundraiser/
Let’s Finish the Year in a Positive Way
This year may have been difficult for many – and those struggles will not disappear come January 1st, but we’d like to find a way to finish the year in a positive way. We look forward to the next month of fundraising excitement!
For the official press release, please go to our media page.
