Giving Back Shouldn’t be Restricted to a Season
During the holiday season, our charitable spirit kicks into high gear. We are donating canned food for the local food bank, toys for Christmas cheer, personal hygiene products, school supplies and even books to local schools and it feels like a perfect time to give back.
But for Market Buffet giving back is not about that ‘one or two months’ of the year, it is about looking for small ways that we can help our community regularly. We’ve really focused on a few areas that mean a lot to us personally and that affect our community; Homelessness, Hunger, Youth Mental Health, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and Families of Grieving Children. Here is a recap of what else we get up to!
Just this past December, Market Buffet BBQ & Smokehouse donated our annual gift s to the local food bank to help families have a wonderful holiday dinner. This year’s donation included 300 lbs of turkey, 250 lbs of chicken and 1800 lbs of vegetables.
The holidays can also be particularly challenging for those that have experienced a loss. Our hope is that our annual holiday dinner and game night for families of the Season Centre for Grieving Children will help bring out some smiles at least once a year.
But what happens to these families on December 26th?
The reality is that help for these individuals and organizations in our community are needed throughout the year. The burst of giving during the holiday season helps, but there is so much more that we can do.
Thanks to our partnership with the Barrie initiative Second Helpings, we can now donate leftover food from our homestyle buffet back into the Barrie community. As a high volume restaurant, we pride ourselves on offering fresh, delicious food throughout the day however there can be a lot of food left over. Second Helpings collects any untouched, leftovers and delivers them once a week to the Salvation Army Barrie Bayside mission centre providing healthy meals to those in need.
Our longstanding relationship with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Barrie and District is always near and dear to our hearts. This includes donating money for school supplies with our August fundraiser and supporting their Annual Curl for Kids.
This year, we were particularly inspired by young advocate of Zach Makes Tracks who cycled, ran and bladed from Barrie to Ottawa to raise awareness around youth mental health. We held an event for Zach and his team in August at Retro Planet and were proud to be a sponsor for Zach’s mission of advocating for youth mental health and continue his initiatives throughout 2018.
Our most recent charitable activity helps to battle one of the biggest growing concerns in our city, homelessness. For the last three years, Market Buffet has been a proud sponsor of Hockey Helps the Homeless.
Each year, owner James Martin of Market Buffet also sponsors a team to participate in the tournament. This year was another phenomenal year with all of the teams raising a total of $116,950.00, which was $18,015 more than their 2018 goal!
We’re double proud that our Market Buffet team was the Top Fundraiser with a total of $19,005.00 (HUGE SHOUTOUT TO OUR TEAM CAPTAIN SHEA THURLOW FOR BEING TOP OVERALL FUNDRAISER WITH A CONTRIBUTION OF $8,050.00)
As each previous year, Market Buffet also donated all of the food for their Draft Night event, a meal prepared by the Culinary Management students at Georgian College, as well as provided lunch for all participants on the Tournament date.
We are so proud to be a part of this thriving Barrie community. We hope that you continue to follow us so that you can contribute and help us to continue to support our favourite charities for 2018!