Covenant House Vancouver

Our thank-a-thons are a volunteer driven program wherein we simply call our donors to thank them for their recent donation.  Often the donor is wary of the call, and is pleasantly surprised when they are simply thanked.  We received an email from a donor who was thanked last night and I'm attaching it because it beautifully sums up why we do thank-a-thons and the meaningful impact they have on our donors.

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I couldn't resist posting this picture of one of our staff wearing the latest spring fashion.  Our Gift in Kind (GIK) Program is thriving right now - maybe it's all that spring cleaning people are doing.  In any case, to say that we get a wide variety of donated clothing would be an understatement.  We are grateful for our donor community's generosity - our youth are always in need of clothing for work and leisure activities.

Click here for a list of items for which we are always in need.  And thank you for thinking of our youth when you have clothes to pass along.

Crystal is owed big time for letting me post this photo

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We have had a debate at Covenant House for many years around using photographs of our youth or "clients" in our promotional materials like the annual report and other donor communications. We have used real youth and we have used models. Most recently we began using stock photography.

The first time we ever used real youth in our general information brochure, two youth that had participated changed their minds after the brochure had been printed. We reprinted the brochure at enormous cost. After that we got more stringent in our "releases" ensuring that youth signed their consent in an attempt to prevent another situation where a young person regretted their decision to be photographed.

We tried models a few times and while it made using the photos "easier", the "look" of the models was not genuine and I felt our communications materials suffered as a result. While we've been back and forth with the model versus real youth debate several times, the advent of affordable stock photography has provided us with good quality, relatively realistic looking youth photos. The drawback is that we no longer have the joy of working with Kent Kallberg, who has been our photographer for many years and always provided us with excellent photographs at a greatly reduced price.  Likewise, we can't show pictures of our programs in action.

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