Where do we begin?
Feeding the mind has always been important to me, whether with knowledge and fun problems, or with food. So when I joined PointClickCare and experienced how much they value giveback initiatives I jumped at the opportunity to start one.
FoodOps was born and has been fighting food insecurity in our staff localities through a variety of donations, employee volunteer hours and corporate support for 5 years – if you’re reading this and contributed in some way/shape/form, you’re the best 🙂
Typically we run campaigns during the summer to give staff something fun to do and during the winter months to keep families happy and healthy during the holiday season.
Regardless of the time of the year, I love integrating some physical ‘boots on the ground’ component – I find the whole experience sticks better with staff when they’re bonding over bad sandwich puns in our local soup kitchen, or challenging each other to see who can move the most flour across a food bank warehouse, or simply being there to provide someone a warm meal and a smile.
Whatever the case is, when they leave for the day and look back on this experience fondly I can rest peacefully knowing that it meant something to them, and whether they realize it or not, that it meant 10x more to someone that needed it.
This year’s summer campaign is going be different
By the time you’re reading this, the cat’s out of the bag – you’re aware this year’s summer event will be carnival themed, and unlike last year’s speed packing activity that went towards Granite Education Foundation’s Back to School drive, this year we’re doing something more… active.
We’re building a game, more literally a carnival-esque shooting gallery, a project we’re dubbing The Hunger Games.
Drop targets and you’ll get points from corporate that you can choose to donate towards a food insecurity initiative of your choice!
Drop a peer and you’ll get double allocation next sprint.
Key tenants for this build;
- Be fun – fancy LED lighting, moving targets, cool sounds and non-lethal projectiles perfect for kids and adults alike, and if we have time a scoreboard to track the pros from the plebs.
- Be reusable – I want this used for different kinds of fun employee engagement events, whether its by my FoodOps committee, corporate giveback, etc. This means the build must be capable of disassembly and reassembly several times over.
- Be friendly – we’re a healthcare SaaS, not a GameStop. Everything from electromechanics to game operation + reset to physical assembly + disassembly should be doable by 2 people without backgrounds in carpentry.
Coming to 5570 near you…
2 months to build this key prop for the FoodOps giveback initiative at our Mississauga (HQ) location is a lot of time… to procrastinate.
So in an effort to keep things moving, document the build and to give people a sneak peek, I’ll be dropping a post about our progress now and then.
This isn’t a huge project for me, but at the same time not a small one… I’ve got a bunch of wicked cool ideas for how I plan to make this engaging, from the game down to art and actual giveback logistics.
Hopefully you find something neat from these reads – whether its a sneak peek to give you an advantage on game day, fun little Easter eggs or just build instructions – which before I forget, will be released in their entirety on the completion of this project. That’ll include CAD files, EAGLE schematics, BOMs and build guides.
