foundation

At what age will you think about your legacy? For drummer Chuck Comeau of multi-platinum-selling pop-punkers Simple Plan, it started at 26.

As hockey fans await the Stanley Cup’s possible arrival north of the border in 2011, Canadians across the country have another reason to cheer. The two largest national cancer charities announced on June 3 that they would be teaming up to expand the popular Road Hockey to Conquer Cancer fundraiser to towns and communities across Canada over the next two years.

The Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation (PMHF) and the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) are planning to extend what is already the largest road hockey fundraiser in the world beyond the Toronto event, which has raised millions of dollars for cancer research since its inception last year, to key markets in 2012.

PMHF president and CEO Paul Alofs said that the idea for the two organizations to collaborate started when he sat down to have a beer with his good friend, Peter Goodhand, the president and CEO for the CCS.

“We talked about the fact that on these big events, we should really be collaborating,” Alofs told Samaritanmag. “Princess Margaret is such a force in Toronto and [the CCS] right across Canada. We hope that Road Hockey to Conquer Cancer will be a little bit like the Terry Fox [Run]. It’ll be in small communities right across the country.”

By expanding this charity event, the CCS’s provincial organizations can help assist specific research centres in other regions of Canada. Specific dates and locations of the 2012 events have not yet been announced.

As a musician, jazz-pop chanteuse Jill Barber always found ‘girls with guitars’ night or other female-only music events ghettoizing, but that is far different from mentoring other females.  That’s why she said yes to Girls Action Foundation’s Light A Spark initiative.

“Essentially, I’ve been invited on as a 'spark' and as a mentor to young women,” Barber tells Samaritanmag.com. “The idea is to inspire younger women to follow their dreams or have confidence and pursue whatever it is that they want. It’s helping them enter it as a women in an industry and not as a woman amongst solely women doing something.”

Barber, who is currently on tour across Canada in support of her latest album, Mischievous Moon, will attend a networking event on May 12 in Vancouver, where she lives.  “That will be my first opportunity to have face time with the young people,” she says.

Girls Action Foundation is a national non-profit supporting more than 240 partnering organizations and projects, which reaches more than 60,000 girls and young women, including those in remote, marginalized and urban communities in Canada.

Many people get behind causes and charities and musicians are often asked to become spokespeople, "ambassadors" or simply perform at a fundraising event when they reach even a modicum of success. When Montreal's Simple Plan had sold close to 4 million albums worldwide, the pop-rock band felt it could not only launch its own foundation but keep it going year after year.

"It was actually a friend's idea and it was right before a big Canadian tour," singer Pierre Bouvier tells Samaritanmag. "Most of the shows were if not sold out, then close to it. There was a friend of ours that said, ‘You have to start a foundation because once you're in there and you have all these venues that are already taking percentages, if everybody cuts a little bit off their percentage, and puts it into this, we can raise a lot of money and make an impact and from there.'"

Drummer Chuck Comeau remembers it being his parents', André Comeau and Françoise Talbot, idea.

"The Foundation was started in 2005," he tells Samaritanmag in a recent email. "We were receiving thousands of letters from fans sharing with us some very sad and tragic stories and telling us how much our music was helping them deal with their difficult situations. We wanted to do something more than just write songs for them so my parents suggested that we should start our very own foundation to give back and help young people in need. The band was into the idea right away and the Simple Plan Foundation was born."