Fittingly, one of the first rooms to be named for a fundraising sponsor at the soon-to-open Youth Resource Centre will come from youth.

Hussain Sattar and Sarah Wood, Grade 12 students at Princess Margaret and YES Project Youth Advisors, along with their peers, will be sponsoring one of the counselling rooms in the centre. The pair are able to sponsor the room because they are doubling their fundraising commitment to $20,000 for the Youth Resource Centre and Foundry Penticton.

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With the help of the Princess Margaret Student Advisory Committee and numerous student volunteers, the two originally wanted to donate $10,000 to the new centre through multiple fundraising activities. This included the annual Princess Margaret Haunted House, which brought in $8,000 alone.

“Our goal was $10,000, and I thought that was a stretch. I had faith in our group, but $10,000 is quite a lot of money,” said Wood. “So when we made $8,000 from this haunted house and found out we were way past our goal, we were shocked and happy that we were able to accomplish that. It’s one thing to reach your goal, but to surpass what you thought you could do, it felt really good.”

The students’ current total for fundraising so far is $11,400 and Sattar said they hope to continue planning other activities until the end of the school year in May or June 2019. He explained they originally brought in $12,400 but the students have an agreement with the school’s Horseshoe Theatre so a portion of the money raised went to them.

Autumn Janzen, a Grade 11 student at Princess Margaret and co-organizer of this year’s haunted house, will be picking up the fundraising and organizing reigns next year once Sattar and Wood graduate. She and the other students are thankful for the support and generosity the community has shown them so far this year.

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“We just wanted to say our biggest thank yous to everyone who helped us and all of our sponsors. We really couldn’t have done it without everybody that helped us out,” said Janzen.

Sattar and Wood are grateful that Janzen stepped up to learn from them this year so the work they’ve done in the community and the high school will continue. As for what the room will be named, the decision has yet to be made.

“We’re going to try and maybe come up with like a saying or a word overall that encompasses what our group has been all about for the past couple years,” said Wood. “We’d like to have something about Hussain and I because we put a lot of hours into this over the past couple years so it would be nice to have kind of a legacy in the building we put so much effort into.”

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“We want a word that represents all of us, because as much as we have done work, Autumn has done so much and the other 40 students who have put time in,” said Sattar.

“It wouldn’t happen if it was just Hussain and I. We can’t do a haunted house with just the two of us,” laughed Wood.

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