Time For Change from Ruby Ku on Vimeo.
We felt such a sense of accomplishment to finally be able to bring our ideas to action. Last Thursday evening at Hotshots Gallery in downtown Toronto, brought together 12 photos, 4 local initiatives, 56 guests, 517 hours of winning bids and a hopeful ripple effect in the local community. These numbers far exceeded anything we could have imagined – we thought we would get bids of 4-5 hours, but the average winning bid was 43 hours, with the highest winning bid being 91 hours (thank you Shawn Yuan)! Moreover, many individuals have come up to us and let us know that they would still love to be involved even though they did not win a photograph. We are so humbled and amazed by everyone’s generosity. And with that, we promise to connect with not only our winners, but anyone interested in engaging in the local community.
In the coming weeks, we will begin conversations with our guests in hopes to match them with a volunteer experience uniquely catered to their skills sets and interests while we ourselves will be working closely as a team to also explore our own journey in matching those 517 winning hours. At the same time, we will be reaching out to local organizations and community initiatives to understand their challenges and skills in need. Updates and stories of the opportunities that our volunteers and ourselves are engaged in will continuously be provided on t4change blog.
This has been a great learning experience for us. We do not have all the answers at the moment, but we are willing to work together to do what we can in order to move things forward. If you have any questions/comments on the event, would like to us to try to identify opportunities for you to get involved in the local community, or simply would like to connect with us, we like discussions over coffee and sushi, so please feel free to contact us!
We do this, simply because Service is our rent to live on earth.
Bookmark souvenir for our guests
Photos have been posted on Flickr:
