Breakfast Club of Canada (BCC) is celebrating 15 years of partnership with the Air Canada Foundation. The collaboration with the carrier's philanthropic arm has allowed the Club to reach outside of Quebec and grow into a national organization which serves meals to more than 250,000 students a day.
Breakfast Club of Canada now promotes health and well-being for all Canadian children, including the country's Indigenous communities.
“They (Air Canada) actually were a founding partner to help us take flight, if you will, to expand our operations outside of Quebec,” says Lisa Clowery, BCC’s director of corporate sponsorships. “It was a big milestone for us to have them as a partner.”
“Air Canada aims to reflect Canadians’ values, which embody those of unity and diversity,” says Air Canada Foundation spokesperson Valerie Durand. “In setting up these programs, it was important for us to support as many communities as possible, including Indigenous communities. Breakfast Club of Canada was already doing it through their programs, so it was a perfect alignment.”
Since the beginning of the partnership, Air Canada Foundation has invested over CAD $1.2 million to help BCC serve more than 2 million breakfasts to more than 11,000 students. The partnership helped establish school breakfast programs for 1,500 Indigenous students from high-need communities in Alberta and Manitoba.
In addition, three to four Indigenous youth from British Columbia are chosen every year to enjoy a trip to Montreal to meet Montreal Canadiens goaltender Carey Price. Children are selected from communities where Price played hockey as a youth.
In 2019, the Air Canada Foundation also committed to funding the opening of two priority breakfast programs in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, as well as sustaining three breakfast programs in remote schools by covering the costs of food purchases and kitchen equipment.
Last year, the Air Canada Foundation designated the Breakfast Club of Canada as a recipient for the cash donations collected from passengers aboard their flights in their Every Bit Counts program. Despite low passengers numbers, the program still collected over CAD $136,000 for the BCC.
For more information on the partnership between Air Canada Foundation and Breakfast Club of Canada, click here.
