NEXTGEN TRADE UP CHALLENGE 2020
Trade 1: a pen for a bottle of cold-pressed orange juice by Hutch + Howl
Trade 2: orange juice for a Christmas cake by Stacey Cakes
Trade 3: a Christmas cake for a Grinch Christmas tree by Simone & Ivy
Trade 4: a Grinch Christmas tree for a $100 gift card by Bella Maas
Trade 5: a gift card for an Oilers jersey by Sports Closet
Trade 6: an Oilers jersey for a Ninja blender by Bob Strang - Mortgage Advisor with CIBC
Trade 7: a Ninja blender for a table hockey game by Autumn (Instagram follower)
Trade 8: a table hockey game for Oilers tickets by Canadian Retail Solutions and the Holman Family
Trade 9: Oilers tickets for golf for four by Melcor
Trade 10: golf for four for $1,000 credit for landscaping by HML Landscape Construction
Trade 11: landscaping for two tickets for the Maroon 5 concert by Chantale Strang - cbs Event Planning
Trade 12: Maroon 5 concert tickets for a garage heater by Hedstrom Mechanical
Trade 13: a garage heater for 4 Oilers LOGE seats by Canadian Brewhouse
Trade 14 - THE FINAL TRADE: Oilers LOGE seats for an Associate Membership for the 2020 golf season worth more than $6,200 by Glendale Golf & Country Club
The trade-up game helped a trio of local realtors turn a pen into a prize worth more than $6,200. That prize is up for auction Saturday night at the Friend Raiser Gala put on by the Sturgeon Community Hospital Foundation and it’s so big that some lucky person will get teed off ... but in a really good way.
The Re/Max Next Generation Real Estate team of Kent Clark, Tug Knowlton and Chantell Plaisant weren’t coy about the prize. They boasted about the colossal trade during their weekly video episode of What’s Up St. Albert? that they linked through their website at thenextgeneration.ca/whatsupstalbert.
“We pride ourselves on being community champions. We're always trying to promote our city here and talk about what's going on in St. Albert,” started Clark. “We all grew up here and we love this city and community.”
Indeed, what’s going on in St. Albert is Saturday’s main event, which serves as the primary fundraiser for the public health institution that serves hundreds of thousands of people all over Northern Alberta. These three really wanted to come up with something good for the auction and they had a lot of help along the way.
It all started with stationery
The game is simple: take something small and trade it for something worth more. Keep trading up and eventually what you have in hand is worth a substantial amount.
Using a suggestion from their marketing head Rob Lelacheur, the team took an office pen and started asking around for trades. They had a lot of friends in the business community so the offers didn’t take long to come in. The first trade was for a bottle of orange juice, cold-pressed no less. Then a cake. Then a Christmas tree. Before you know it, sports-related items were in the picture.
After 14 trades, they hit gold with an associate membership to the Glendale Golf and Country Club, worth more than $6,200. That’s a whopper of an item to bid on.
Making a big mark on public health
The trade-up was a fun game, they admitted, but it had a serious objective at its heart: helping the community at every turn.
“We've made it quite clear that this is a community initiative: getting the community behind the hospital foundation. The people that we reached out to are often the people that are behind boards and charitable philanthropy-type work,” Knowlton added, saying it was a way of giving back to them and in a fun way too. “We wanted to make sure that we presented ourselves as the vessel rather than the heroes of the community. The community’s getting behind it. It's not us. We've come up with an idea but the community was the one that rallied.”
For Plaisant, it was important to help the hospital any way she could. Like so many people, she was thankful for the professionalism and compassion of the health care teams at the Sturgeon Hospital when her child was treated there recently.
“It was a bit of a scare and the staff and doctors during that were unbelievable. They were just so accommodating and sincere and cared so well for us. As soon as the boys,” she said, referring to her teammates, “came to us with this idea to go to the Sturgeon Hospital Gala ... it hit me at home from that.”
Having to go to the hospital probably hits home for a lot of people, too. There must be a massive crowd of people who wish they could fully offer their thanks and appreciation in the same way as she.
The good news for the Sturgeon Community Hospital Foundation: the event is sold out. The good news for everybody else is that public bidding is still allowed on the auction items. Go to sturgeonhospitalgala.ca for more details.
Once the NextGen trade-up prize is unveiled at the gala, bidding will go live on the site as well.
