Rotary Club thanks Blind River residents, businesses for hard work during COVID-19 pandemic

The Blind River Rotary Club is running a thank you project to show businesses and individuals their appreciation for the work they have done, and strict restrictions businesses have had to cope with during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Club president Eva Whitmore said the project aims to show appreciation to the community and all the obstacles businesses have faced in the past 14 months.

“We're delivering about 700 tokens of appreciation to employees of businesses around Blind River,” she said. “We will try to hit all who have continued to serve the public throughout much of the last year.”

“Each gift has a tag that says ‘A token of appreciation from the Rotary Club of Blind River for continuing to hang in there’ in these challenging times. Thank you for being there for our community and a thank you to the bakers on the, who donated their goods to the project, back,” she said.

A Touch of Home is donating the time to bake 600 gifts approximately 1,200 cupcakes and Chateau Elma is donating the time to bake 120 gifts or about 780 cookies. The deliveries are spread out because the bakers are limited to how much they can bake in a day.

“We started today, and it will take 10 days - this Monday to Thursday, next Monday to Thursday, and the Monday and Tuesday following,” the president said of delivery times of the gifts that will go to about 94 businesses, including the OPP station, hospital and Golden Birches Terrace.

Rotary ran a smaller version of the project last spring with coffee and donuts, to the hospital, grocery store, home hardware, OPP and post office.

“This year we expanded to businesses that have generally stayed open during this past year whose employees have to take risks to serve the public,” she said. “Teachers would have been included if schools had reopened.”

Rotary will also see a change in leadership with Whitmore and her husband Mark finishing their two-year stint as president and secretary but will continue as members. The new president is Bob McAllister, and the new secretary is Kim Tambeau.