The Tribune

By ALESHA CADET

Tribune Features Reporter

acadet@tribunemedia.net

IN AN effort to give back to the Bahamian community, a local company presented the “Summer of Chances” series this week for the benefit of children in need.

Hosted by the Chances webshop organisation, members of the summer series that started on Monday and concludes today visited the Elizabeth Estates Children’s Home as well as the Children’s Emergency Hostle to make each child’s summer bucket list dreams come true.

Randia Coakley, an employee at Chances, said the Freeport based webshop has been receiving a lot of feedback in regards to giving back to the community. She said the “Summer of Chances” was their way of showcasing some of their efforts.

“Chances has been around for a long time and they have done many services in Freeport particularly. For example, we assisted a lady with her kids by means of donations and whatever she needed for them. ‘Summer of Chances’ is our way of helping kids in Nassau. We visited the kids a few weeks ago asking them to write their summer bucket list and we tried to make as many of the things come to life,” Randia told Tribune Entertainment.

She said one of the girls listed a shopping spree. While Randia did not have enough in her budget to send the little girl abroad, she was able to connect with a local clothing company to allow the girl a day of shopping fun.

“We were also able to connect with other local companies to give back to these kids. A lot of the kids wanted to do sports activities such as soccer, so we collaborated with a local soccer club where they taught the kids many skills. The group actually wants to make it a long-term partnership where they will continue to encourage the students and their goals.

The kids also wanted to go to Mr Pretzels located in the Mall at Marathon, so we will be visiting there as well where they will enjoy a day of fun and basically being a kid,” said Randia.
She said Chances will continue with this work for Christmas as well as next spring. Whenever school kids are on breaks, she said Chances will be happy to help out.

“The reason I think this is beneficial us because in my eyes it gives the kids something different to do and be occupied with. I know when I was a kid I would always write a list of things that I wanted to do and I would always get them done because it was so much fun and exciting as a child,” she said.

“I had my parents who could financially do these things for me, but there are some kids out there that do not have the privilege of doing things that they want to do for the summer. Our goal is to give them a chance to experience summer how any kid would want to.

“With the ‘Summer of Chances’ we also expanded into our summer party series for the month of July in Nassau. At each of the seven locations in Nassau we are hosting a party where we have live entertainment and live games. It is all free.”