Before I left I was given an opportunity by Loretta Cella (Director and Founder of the Passion Foundation) to take her workshop to a group of girls in Ethiopia. The non profit supports, encourages, and empowers young women. Also, helping them build leadership skills that can contribute to them giving back to their community. On top of that, Madeleine Shaw (Co-Founder of Lunapads) jumped on board and gave me 15 Lunapad kits to take to the girls!
While I was there, I was able to do a 6 hour workshop with about 8 girls. Most of them came from struggling families. Whenever questions would be asked about future goals and what they do in their spare time, the answers always came back to helping their mothers and families make a better life for themselves. All of those girls are so driven and focused on making a better life for them self that it makes me stop to think about how easy I have it. One of the young girls said how she wanted to work for the Red Cross so she could help people. WHERE DO YOU HEAR THAT these days!?!?
They were so incredibly appreciative of the opportunity of being able to do the workshop. OH AND THEN! The Lunapad kits were a hit! When I took them out and demonstrated on how to use them, a flood of giggles erupted from all of them. After they understood how to use them, they became excited and very grateful. It was one of the most rewarding days being able to be and talk with them. Thank you SO MUCH Loretta and Madeleine for the opportunity!!!

All in all, AN AMAZING TRIP!! (Until next year..)

A few milestones of 2011:

We were one of the winners of Edelman Vancouver’s Little Give. It resulted in an unbelievable Edelman team contributing 48 hours of their time and energy to help build our first real campaign and solicit the support of Mary Olson, Clutch Designs, to create our fabulous Passion Necklaces. As well as set up our new Facebook community page and update our website.

We were able to start and complete two great Passion Projects and launch our passionTOaction (p2a) pilot for young women in the Vancouver area, contributing directly to the lives of 30 young women.

These projects resulted in teachers and community members reaching out to us and sharing their gratitude for the shifts they saw in the young women who took part in the projects and the participants walking away with life long leadership tools to build on their passions, goals, and lives.

” My words and actions are now bold and brave, authentic and honest, powerful and inspiring. I am truly me!” – Passion Leader

The p2a team also had a booth in the LOVE Vancouver festival and participated in a number of other initiatives including working with Lori Petryk on the Good for You, Good for the Earth segments on Shaw Cable. The young women involved in the pilot have moved on and are continuing to do amazing things in their communities.

We are extremely grateful to Jenn McRae, the p2a volunteer Coordinator and all the young sustainability leaders who helped contribute with the pilots’ success including Gordon Youth Search House for donating their space for us to operate in. We also extend our appreciation to  Mark from Reel Youth and the United Way’s Care to Change campaign for the film projects the young women took part in. This contribution of time, resources, and talent resulted in one the films being chosen for the Reel Youth VIFF showings.

In addition we are still working on our social enterprise Giovanni’s Passion with our amazing YWiB team, Lucia and Kiran. What a journey it’s been but thanks to our mentors and advisors we are making progress. Our goal is to have a milestone for this venture by May 9, 2012.

The latter part of this year has been focused on building our network and creating sustainability for our organization. As a result of these efforts we secured our first social investors, the Fraser Wilson Foundation and Vancity Community Foundation.

Loretta Cella, Executive Director and Founder of Passion Foundation, has been running 100 km per hour for the last four years taking her passion out into a number of communities in the world while working full time in employment services. Now thanks to this generous investment she is able to focus on building our community in a number a ways. Within the last month she was able to sign on three new dynamic directors, scheduled training new facilitators for January, and bring in 14 new advisors to form a diverse committee of business women to assist in our movement of  reaching out to more girls and young women in 2012.

There are so many exciting things coming for 2012 and we felt it necessary to share our appreciation with everyone who has supported us in donating their time, energy, and resources.

Special note from our Executive Director and Founder:

“Without the support of our community we would not be able to have made such a powerful contribution in the world. It is all of you who provide us with your passion and energy that assist us in giving it back to girls and young women. Because of this, their lives have changed and will continue to change as they continue to believe they can do anything. There is no dollar amount to place on this value to our world.  We hope that you continue to share your passions with us and support us and our new leaders in 2012. Sending you all much heartfelt gratitude!” Loretta Cella, ED. Founder, Passion Foundation

May 2012 bring you all a deeper connection with your passion, health, and goals. We look forward to connecting with you in the new year.

The Passion Team

Here are the details:

Passion Foundation is having a fundraising event on Sept 8th from 530-830p in Vancouver. That’s next week!

It’s going to be a great evening of food and wine, a mini seminar with Advanced Spa Technologies, a skin consultation and more!

The first person to sell 10 tickets to their network wins the gift certificate. It’s that easy!!! Talk to your friends, co-workers, neighbours, and tweet away!

Track the names of your guests and email them to us.

Have questions contact us at  info@passionfounation.org

Please take a moment and check out our videos and help the youth win by voting!

AGE OF VULNERABILITY
HER STORY
GOING NOWHERE

And all the cool kid are wearing them.

They come in a ball chain, with a pewter passion flower logo, beautiful rose quartz pendant, and all funds go to provide free programming to girls in BC in the upcoming school year.

For the hipsters we have 30″ chains, for you classics we have 18″, and you short chain lovers we have 16″

$20/each

They will soon be available on the Clutch website or please call 604.395.7685 for orders!

Thanks to Edelman Vancouver and our FANTASTIC Little Give team for making this happen!

passionTOaction sustainability video for Care to Change Contest

passionTOaction sustainability video for Care to Change Contest

passionTOaction sustainability video for Care to Change Contest

Special thanks to Mark and the Reel Youth team for sharing this great opportunity!

We’ve highlighted some of their journey in our Vancouver Observer articles as these girls are really taking their leadership to the next level and it’s something that needs to be shared with our beautiful city.

Recently the girls from p2a were given an amazing opportunity to take part in the Love Vancouver Festival.

Marie-Claire and Hannah shared this video from their experiences at LVF. Oh! Did we mention their amazing blog?

Today three of the girls: Laura, Marie-Claire and Hannah met Loretta Cella, Passion ED at Lunapads where Madeleine Shaw shared her story of starting Lunapads and why their amazing products make a difference in this world and in the lives of girls and women around the world.

We can’t thank people like Madeleine and all the other volunteers enough for sharing their experiences and energy with the p2a team. As well at Vancouver organizations like Gordon Youth Search Employment Programs for donating space each week.

The p2a girls are also taking part in an incredible new tv series on SHAW cable called Good for You, Good for the Earth with our fabulous Passion Board Member Lori Petryk. Stay tuned for details!

There are all kinds of statistics out there about the high percentages of girls and young women who experience abuse and violence. Today we were shown a stat that 1 in 8 girls are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. And the average age of a woman who enters into prostitution in Canada is 12-14 years old. That’s real. We also know that when a girl feels confident in who she is and is socially connected in a positive way the percentages go down and she more likely she is to ask for help if something does happen.

So instead of just talking about it, a group of girls in Vancouver got to design their personal space, talk about what it means, and shared with their peers how it changes based on how they were feeling. They even got to take their personal space and share it with others as they moved around the room. They were able to determine how it changed as they encountered some of the others in the room (bigger or smaller) and how they’re emotions accompanies the change.

Essentially Passion Projects build life literacy. Passion Projects are ways that girls really get to know who they are, what they want, and how to bring positive community together to make it all happen! They provide girls a safe space to build their potential from the inside out!

Check out some of their designs. You can imagine how fun the dialogue was and how empowering it was for the girls to own their space and bring that space in their community.

Today we completed our work together but holding mini conference fun day at their school. They had the ideas, they generated the activities, and we put it together. They even got to invite some of their class mates

Thanks to some amazing volunteers including Tiffany from Beauty Night Society who taught the girls to make homemade hair condition and face masks and Julia Spitale who sing with and for the girls (even Loretta, Passion ED, did her duet debut!). With generous donations from Kat Thorsen we made sock pigs. And thanks to Vyvian’s mom who came out and did 30 sets of nail polish designs we had a busy four hours and lots of fun!

It was amazing to see all the girls, their leadership and the positive contribution to their school and peers. We even had our sponsor teacher state how amazing it has been to see the transformation in the girls and the vice principal has invited us to come back next year.

Passion Avenue girls.. you are amazing! You’ve done amazing work and we are all so proud of you!

We’d also like to give a special shout out to our amazing new volunteer Sabine who gave her entire morning/afternoon to helping us out and making today run smoothly!

Check out some pictures we shot today!

Edelman is Canada’s leading independent public relations firm and we at Passion are so excited to see what wonderful things we can create in the 48 hrs we have with our Edelman team.

Passion Foundation is ready for the next steps. We are ready to reach out to more girls so they in turn can reach their goals and contribute more positively in their communities.

Stay tuned!