The last 18 months have been tough.
It would have been extremely easy for people to use that as an excuse for bad behaviour, but from where I sit these days, more people than I can count have actually taken the sour, rotten lemons they’ve been dealt and turned them into honest to goodness lemonade.
Take, for example, a young lady who lost her job after the company she had been working for went bankrupt due to the pandemic.
Sure, she could have sat at home feeling sorry for herself, and she’d have had every right. Instead, she picked herself up by the bootstraps and decided to help others in her community that were worse off than she was.
She spent her free time and used her own money — which was dwindling quickly — to get much-needed food items to those in need. When she lost the space she’d been using to run her program, she could have given up again, but instead, she doubled down and has working as hard as she can in order to continue running the program, which, despite having only been operational for a few months, has helped fill a much-needed gap in the city.
Another example I have come across recently is local third-grader Lincoln Cole (no relation!) who was recently kicked out of a Toronto Blue Jays game after he and his father dared to question the amount of water he had been given after purchasing pop and popcorn at the concession stand.
(For anyone who cares to know, in Ontario, in order to serve alcohol, a restaurant — or in this case stadium — is required to offer free water to patrons as a stipulation of having an Ontario liquor licence.)
Instead of wallowing in his disappointment, this eight-year-old took it as an opportunity to help others and decided to try to raise money to bring clean drinking water to Indigenous communities in Canada, setting an initial goal of $1,000.
When I met him, he was excited to have raised around $200. Last time I checked, he had raised more than $4,000!
These two examples are just a tiny sample of the amazing things I have witnessed here in Barrie, but every day I open my email, talk to people or scroll through social media, I see dozens more. It makes me truly proud to be a part of this community and to get to share these efforts with BarrieToday readers.
I can only hope that whatever inspires them to be so open-hearted and giving will continue to rub off on the people around them and inspire the rest of us to step up in whatever way we can to make our home an even better place to be.
