There was a steady turnout at the Duchess Park craft fair on Saturday. Photos 250News

Prince George, B.C. – The Duchess Park Craft Fair is one of the newer kids on the craft fair block in Prince George but it certainly received support on Saturday.

Duchess Park Home EC teacher Brenda Gagnon is one of the sponsors of a group at the school called Me to We.  She explains “it’s a world-wide movement that spawned off of Free the Children which has been going for about 15 years.  Every year they do a big promotional thing with the kids called We Day, and we go to Vancouver, to Rogers Centre, and this year there were 19,000 kids there and we had kids come out on stage who are already doing good things in the world.”

“The whole purpose of Me to We is to change the kids’ perspective from it’s all about me to it’s all about we.  So it’s that global initiative to make the world a better place.”

Gagnon says this is the third year for the craft fair “and so the money that’s raised here goes to our Me to We group for our global goals and it’s usually to do with education and water, and our local goals are doing food bank things, we have a food bank here right at our school to help with the kids in need and the families in need at our school.”

“So the kids can come to me to get items for lunch or, if there’s no food at the house at home, they can take a backpack of food home.  And that’s where the money these kids raise goes.”

So the vendors who set up at the craft fair pay a fee for their table(s) and they take the money from their sales.  Gagnon says “anything that’s raised from those tables, from the concession, from the things that we do here, it goes to what the kids are working on in their plans for helping refugees, helping globally build wells and educating and feeding children in third world countries.”

Students who are involved do everything from set-up and take-down of the venue to taking two-hour shifts in the concession, at the raffle table and other locations.  And Gagnon says “we have a teacher here at our school whose young daughter has leukemia and has been in Children’s Hospital since March.”

“So we have a table here with these cranes because (daughter) Olivia had read the book “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes”.  It’s about cancer, and the making of a thousand cranes, you know it’s a legend about curing cancer.”

“So the fundraisers that have been going on throughout the city, people all over have made the cranes and we beaded and strung them and we’ve got a table where the kids are actually selling them.  And the money will go either to the Frost family or to research and mostly support the kids that are at Ronald MacDonald House.”

This was the third year for the Duchess Park Craft Fair.  Judging by the turnout it’ll be back again next year.