Lacombe goes pink! Kindness spreads throughout the community

If you look around the City, you may notice one thing we all have on thing in common: Pink Shirts! Today is Pink Shirt Day and local businesses and residents are saying no to bullying by donning their pink shirts and even putting out special pink items and decorations to mark the occasion.  

“We had a really great turn out of businesses and organizations that signed up for our Kindness Month. We just kicked off a bunch of things today in support of Boys and Girls Club and the FCSS,” said Executive Director of the Lacombe Family and Community Support Service (FCSS), Crystal Zens.  

Today marks the official Pink Shirt Day but the Lacombe FCSS and Wolf Creek BGC have been celebrating kindness all month long. The organizations have been selling pink shirts in support of BGC Programming.  

Zens says it has been great to see the support in the community which she says has tripled since last year.  

“A huge shout out to our community for really embracing it lots of organizations are doing kindness challenges and a pay it forward initiative. We're just busy keeping up with all of the tagging and sharing. It's been a lot of fun to see people embrace the kindness campaign and really go big for Pink Shirt Day in our community,” added Zens.  

The Lacombe FCSS started the initiative last year during the pandemic. Since then it has really exploded in the community. 63 local businesses in Lacombe are taking part this year which is up from the 22 that participated last year.  

“Lots of different FCSS agencies in Alberta contacted me for information on our campaign and the templates and things like that. That's really awesome to see that begin. I think the first Pink Shirt Day in Canada was started in 2007 from a child that got bullied for wearing a pink shirt to school. Something so detrimental could be turned into such an extraordinary amount of kindness and this great initiative of Pink Shirt Day that has spread across our country is awesome to be part of,” she explained.  

There are six more days left of the Lacombe FCSS and Wolf Creek BGC’s kindness campaign and there is still time to purchase a pink shirt in support of BGC programming.  The initiative will wrap up at the end of February!