By Mike Davey
St. Catharines, Ontario — May 30, 2016 — The Fort McMurray fire saw an outpouring of support from individuals and businesses who wanted to help people in their time of need. One of those businesses was CSN-Glen Merritt Collision in St. Catharines. The facility held a car wash recently, with proceeds going to help the evacuees from Fort McMurray.
CSN-Glen Merritt is located in St. Catharines, Ontario, hundreds of kilometres away from Fort McMurray. Nevertheless there was a personal connection to the fundraising. In fact, there turned out to be two.
Jenny Parsons works at CSN-Glen Merritt and came up with the idea for the car wash. Her connection to the Fort McMurray fire came through a relative.
“I have a family member who is a firefighter there,” she said in an interview with Collision Repair magazine. “We’ve got a long history of giving back to the community, so I talked to Julio (Bruno, co-owner/operator of CSN-Glen Merritt) about putting on a car wash and he said ‘Go for it!'”
The team came together to plan and organize the event, and soon the facility’s vendors were showing their support as well.
“We put the word out, and pretty soon we had about 25 donations from local Niagara dealers and vendors,” says Parsons.
Discount Car & Truck Rentals was one of the vendors who helped support the event. The company provided a BBQ lunch and staff volunteered during the car wash. That’s where the second personal connection comes up.
It turns out that one of the volunteers from Discount, Vanessa Miles, was actually an evacuee from Fort McMurray. After she was evacuated from Fort McMurray, the company sent her to St. Catharines, where Miles has family and she’s currently working at the local Discount location.
