Hi my name is Sarah MacDonald-Miles. I am 19 years old, I am a graduate student from Lockview High School and a graduated from the Nova Scotia Community Collage - Truro Campus. I am one of the founders of the Links of Love project and this is the story of how it was founded on my 14th birthday May 15, 2018. I have been a member of the Me to We youth empowerment group since 2015. Me to We is an amazing group that encourages you to help change your perspective about yourself and the world you live in. I helped with lots of different initiatives like we scare hunger food drives, flash mob cash mob to collect money for HomeBridge, bake sales for Feed Nova Scotia etc, but I knew I could do more to help on my own. So I started the Share the Warmth project in November 2016 with the help of my parents. The Share the Warmth (Kindness is Contagious) project collects gently used winter coats and accessories during the months of November and December and distributes them to local shelters who are in desperate need of them. In 2017 the Share the Warmth (Kindness is Contagious) partnered with the Brunswick Street Mission and with the support of the director Laura Maudsley, they became the sole recipients of the collection of coats and accessories. I went to the Brunswick Street Mission and met some of the people who worked there and also met people who need the Mission to help them get through the winter by providing food, clothing and shelter. After I left the Brunswick Street Mission it really got me thinking about the children and the families I saw just trying to survive. No matter what happened to them to put them in the situation where they needed help, they still needed help and if everyone could see and understand that when people need help the right thing to do is to help if you can.

I talked to my parents about wanting to do more than just food drives at Halloween and the coat collection in the winter. I wanted to do something all year round that could help my community and also inspire other people like me to do something to help their communities.

Every week I had little meetings with my mother and we talk about what we could do and what charity we were going to help. I started to think about how every person is like a link and if we all joined together it would make a chain, and chains are stronger than just a single link. That gave me the idea of the Links of Love (Making a difference one link at a time). Now we needed something to promote.

After several meetings my mom and I came up with using bracelets to represent the links. The links are infused with a natural bug repellent that I invented last year. It is a mixture of natural oils and helps to keep away bugs. The heat from your body releases the scent. Mom said we need to provide a bracelet for people who want to support the charities but can’t have scents because of allergies or work restrictions, so we have unscented ones too. I used the world as a part of my logo because we are all here on the planet together and together we can make a difference in someone's life who really needs it. The Celtic trinity knot in the center of the world is connected by a heart, symbolizing that we are all connected together.

So many people want to help but they don’t know how or they think because they don’t have a lot of money that they can’t make a difference, but if everyone just did a little bit it would help out in a big way. Mom calls it the law of compounding. I call it the snowball effect.

So now we had our product to promote. We had a name and a logo and at our weekly meetings we decided what charities we wanted to help. There are so many amazing charities, but we decided on five different ones. I really wanted to help a charity that was helping children my age so they know they are not alone and I want to inspire them to help give back too. I met some of the members of HomeBridge at one on my Me to We meetings and I realized how important it is for children to help out other children if they can so that they know someone cares about them. The other charities will be the Brunswick Street Mission (who I have helped and will continue to help with the Share the Warmth project), The SPCA, Feed Nova Scotia and we now have Make-A-Wish Atlantic Provinces .

Our Bracelets and Heart Strings start at $10.95. The sale of each item directly supports programs and services within our community. I want people to know that even a small amount can help. If we work together it can snowball into a big amount.

 

Update September 2019: I now have my online store open!!! You may have noticed that the price of the bracelets have increased by $0.95 , this is to cover the cost of shipping, service fees etc. So now when you buy a bracelet: taxes and shipping are included in the price of the bracelets and the sale of each item directly supports programs and services within our community!!!!