Baking Goodies and Wearing Pink to Support Anti-Bullying
Here in Canada we have a decade-long annual tradition of wearing pink shirts as a sign of solidarity against bullying. The tradition was started by two teenagers in Nova Scotia named Travis Price and David Sheppard, who heard that a younger student was being bullied for wearing a pink shirt to school.
Bullying isn’t just an issue in Canada (a nation mistakingly known as an overly-polite and apologetic country.) Young people around the world face issues with overly-aggressive bullies attacking their self-esteem. There are numerous reports of young people harming themselves when they don’t know how to cope with the endless bombardment from bullies. Teachers and parents don’t always know how to deal with the situation, offering ‘quick fixes’ like forcing the two participants (bully and the bullied) to just ‘hug it out’.
Spoiler alert: the issue of bullying isn’t exclusive to young people, and it’s not exclusive to schools, either. Bullying is a major problem at home, in the office, and across the internet (hence why we built Community Sift.) Teaching young people how to become more resilient is only becoming more important.
Today, our team at Two Hat Security hosted a bake sale to raise funds to support anti-bullying initiatives across Canada. We raised over $400 at our little sale, and our team is chipping in to bring the total to a nice big $1,000.
Hooray!
All the proceeds will be donated to the CKNW Orphans’ Fund, who disperse the funds to different child and youth programs. We’re excited about this, as these programs support healthy self-esteem for children and their peers. They teach empathy, compassion, and kindess – three things all close to any loving parent’s heart.
Check out the interview courtesy of the Capital News:
The theme of this year’s Pink Shirt Day is the “Pink Shirt Promise”, encouraging others to share kindness with others. We used up some precious whiteboard space to encourage each other in the office:
And our UX afficiando Jesse even whipped up this fun Pink Shirt Day virtual t-shirt maker to help spread the word. Fun!
Here’s to another successful Pink Shirt Day. In the meantime, we’re going to get back to work, since we spend all year working to end bullying online! There’s still so much to do, after all. Perhaps we need to consider wearing pink shirts as a new team uniform every day… 😊
