Student group raises money for community support program
The student club Big Spoon Lil Spoon, which provides cooking classes for kids in the Kingston community, hosted a clothing sale in collaboration with Common Ground Coffee Shop on Thursday to raise money for the City’s youth.
Big Spoon Lil Spoon aims to provide workshops and employment opportunities for youths with disabilities and their siblings, and was first started by Victoria Preston-Walker (ArtSci ’21) when she was in first year.
Preston-Walker, currently an intern in the Office of the Vice-Principal (Finance and Administration) (VPFA), helped initiate the clothing drive with an aim to push for sustainability by recycling old clothes.
With more than one hundred bags of old clothes sitting in her office at Richardson, Preston-Walker said donations were received from students and staff.
“[The clothing drive] was mostly targeted with the VPFA, a portfolio which is basically the non-academic side of the University,” she said in an interview with The Journal. “This includes physical plant services and investment services.”
On the student side of the donation, volunteers from Big Spoon Lil Spoon were assigned to solicit donations from three locations: Mitchell Hall, Biosciences Complex, and Macintosh-Corry Hall.
Funds raised by the event will go toward Big Spoon Lil Spoon’s local programming and Kingston, Walker said. “It will go toward providing cooking classes to kids who are from the Kingston area who take part in our programming.”
“It allows them to learn necessary life skills like cooking, grocery shopping, and budgeting.”
While the event aims to raise awareness about sustainability and help raise funds for Big Spoon Lil Spoon’s cause, Preston-Walker said leftover donations will be donated to Kingston’s Loving Hands.
“[Loving Hands] is associated with a number of nonprofit organization in Kingston, such as the youth shelter or the halfway houses,” Preston-Walker said.
“We donate to Loving Hands and then they distribute it to other organizations,” she added.
