The new Community Living North Bay kitchen has been transformed into a bakery the past few days to ramp up for the start of the Tim Horton’s Smile Cookie Campaign.
On Sunday and Monday office staff were toiling in the kitchen helping make more than 6,000 cookies.
“We have people with blisters on their fingers, shoulder injuries from stirring cookie dough which was tough to work with and we have another 240 or 250 dozen to do,” said Sherry Carnevale, Executive Director at Community Living North Bay Monday afternoon.
One dollar from every smile cookie will go toward Community Living North Bay. Last year, it was a great success as more than $40,000 was raised through local cookie sales.
Carnevale says the sales were so good last year that they caught the Tim Horton’s stores completely off guard.
“We kind of blew them out of the water and stores were running out of smile cookies because by the time they gave the cookies to us they did not have enough capacity to serve the general public,” recalled Carnevale.
The Smile Cookie program started in 1996 in a Tim Horton’s restaurant in Hamilton. Since then, the program has grown to include all restaurants across Canada and expanded into the United States. To date, the Smile Cookie program has raised over $46M for local charities.
Tim Horton’s has always been a leader and supporter of Community Living North Bay and has employed people with intellectual disabilities for many years.
Community Living North Bay supports more than 500 people with intellectual disabilities and their families, by providing a diverse range of inclusion-based services that begin at EarlyOn Child and Family Centre (formerly the Early Years Centre), to transitioning from school to helping individuals find employment, to finding apartments and homes.
