Friday, May 22, 2020 5 Brooklin Town Crier Optimist Club Reimagines Events By Tanja Coughlan, President, Brooklin Optimist Club As a local service club, The Optimist Club of Brooklin regularly hosts events for kids in the community. But what happens when circumstances dictate that you can't do that anymore? Unfortunately we have had to cancel many of our usual events. However, this has created an opportunity for us to reimagine some of our events and think of new and different ways to serve the community to fulfil our motto of bringing out the best in kids. For example, we reimagined our annual Easter Egg Eggstravaganza from a live and in-person Easter egg hunt to a virtual one that families could do on their own to observe social distancing. The community was encouraged to put up pictures of eggs or to decorate their property with them. Families participated by reporting how many eggs they found each day and over the entire week. The Easter Bunny, who normally attends the event each year, recorded a video to reveal the winner and did porch drop offs to the three winning families. Initially canceled, the annual Oratorical contest (public speaking) was reformatted to be a Zoom teleconference with participants, judges and audience members in their own homes. The club gave out $600 in scholarships. The winner was Vineysh Neethan, a Grade 6 student, who will go on to a district competition (also via Zoom) on May 31. A brand new initiative developed to keep kids busy, learning, and having fun is the Daily Challenges. We know parents are having to do it all right now and keeping kids entertained and coming up with new things for them to do while working is a lot, which is why we launched the challenges. They're posted daily on the Optimist Club of Brooklin Facebook page and pictures and videos of the completed challenges are posted in response. Daily and weekly prizes are awarded. The challenges vary and range from arts and crafts to physical to just plain fun. The sidewalk art challenge was a big hit. One mother said it's the only thing that's been motivating her six-year old son. The Brooklin Optimist Club has two new $1,000 scholarships up for grabs this year. The scholarships, which encourage volunteer work, are available to graduating and first year post-secondary students from Brooklin, including those pursuing careers in the trades. The deadline for entries is May 30.