A Camosun College Marketing Project Management (MARK 420) group will be selling scarves and donating 100 percent of the proceeds to Victoria-based charity ICO Nepal on Wednesday, November 23. The event will be held from 11:30 am to 2:30 pm on the first floor of Interurban’s Centre for Business and Access (CBA) building, and is open to Camosun students and faculty, as well as the general public.
Group member Tom Walker says he and the others in his group—Brooke Kuyvenhoven, John Jhereco Pulido, Marisol Barragán, Martin Kurian, and Tracy Pham—were given a project that involved raising awareness for one of four charities. The group chose to work with ICO Nepal, specifically the ICO Nepal Women’s Health Camps and ICO Nepal Kaski Education initiatives, after hearing the charity’s founder’s impactful stories from Nepal.
“I guess they do this every semester [MARK 420’s] on, where students take on a charitable cause and try to raise awareness or money for that charity,” says Walker. “The guy that runs the charity ICO Nepal is a guy called Brad McLoughlin, and he’s been going back and forth to Nepal since he was young, and some of the stories that he was able to tell us got us really excited about the project.”
In Nepal, education and women’s health are severely underfunded, which is why the MARK 240 group chose to donate to the ICO Nepal Women’s Health Camps and Kaski Education initiatives. With the money they raise, ICO Nepal will be able to provide more hygiene packages and post-birth assistance for women, as well as offer scholarships for students.
“[ICO Nepal] support women’s clinics that offer hygiene packages for them and also some support so they don’t have to go back to the farm straight away,” says Walker. “The other initiative they work on is education. In Nepal, education wasn’t free until recently for K through 12. They also have mandatory school uniforms that most people can’t afford, and if you don’t have a uniform, you can’t go to school. So those are some other things that ICO Nepal offers. They offer scholarships to students young and old.”
While they’re supporting ICO Nepal by selling these scarves, the group has outsourced the scarves from an organization in Nepal called Yes Helping Hands.
“We’re going to be selling fair-trade cashmere scarves and they’re made by deaf and blind weavers in Nepal,” he says. “It’s another charity we’re supporting just by buying our products through them and selling them over here and bringing the money right back to Nepal.”
Any students or faculty who are looking for Christmas presents will want to stop by their event, says Walker. It’s an opportunity to get some great gifts while supporting a cause.
“The scarves, we don’t have a final price, but they sell between $35 and $45 per scarf,” he says. “So, any students or faculty or really anyone who wants to do some Christmas shopping, get some really great gifts for a decent price and support a great cause should definitely come by and check out our booth.”
This is Walker’s final year at Camosun, and he says this has been the most rewarding and memorable course he’s taken by far.
“I’ll be graduating this December, and this is the most rewarding course I’ve ever taken by a long shot,” he says. “It’s just so cool to be seeing your work actually do good in the world.”