Non Profit Organizations continued to push through the pandemic and had to get creative to adjust to COVID-19.
Tara Tennant, director and Former President of the Cobden Agricultural Society, explains the hardest thing her and her team had to deal with.
“Our big struggle was that our annual fair was cancelled, because we can’t have people gathering. That’s really our one big event for the year. As well as all of our weddings, dances and fundraisers. Even though we’re not for profit does not mean that we don’t have to make money to maintain the space and to maintain our presence in the community. So all of our sources of revenue dried up really, really quickly and we had to come up with new ways to figure out how to maintain our existence, basically.”
This resulted in having to figure out other ways to raise money.
“The first hurdle was the mindset, we took a really proactive stance and looked at how long this could last and where are we going to be financially? We had to ask ourselves, what can we do differently this year for fundraisers?”
But not after long, Tara and her team were able to problem solve and came up with a new idea on how to fundraise.
“We came up with the idea of hosting a virtual fair Rather than having people come to the ground, we did a bunch of online stuff. Then we worked on other ideas of things that we could do and that’s where we came up with the virtual auction, where we did an online auction”
Even though Tara’s non profit organization was able to continue, doesn’t mean all non profit organizations had that benefit. Paul Seale, the Membership Engagement Manager for Pillar Nonprofit Network, explains what kind of help non profit organizations received from the Government and what Pillar offered to these organizations.
“The Government did offer a variety of reliefs that nonprofits were eligible for, although not the core stabilization funds that we and our provincial and federal counterparts are advocating for. So this is one of the reasons that we’ve been so devoted, and dedicated to getting timely information into our member communications and into our resource pages, some releases available to some individuals and organizations in a variety of ways.”
Nonprofit Organizations are another sign that everything has been affected by COVID-19 and shows that persevering through, can change things for good.
