Students from École Secondaire Notre Dame High School got pretty creative to earn a big chunk of change.

This year, they decided the money would go to the Central Alberta Children’s Advocacy centre, after what Shannon Nivens, Grad Service Project Coordinator says was a bit of a process.

“We then have what we call pitch week, where we invite those five charities in over lunch time and they present to those students essentially a show and tell,” Nivens explains, “they tell us why we should choose them and then the students vote and we choose a charity.”

Nivens says the project is led by the grade twelve students, and each team is challenged to raise the same amount as their grad year, so in this case $2,019.

They brought their creativity to the table to raise a whopping amount of $45,000 so far.

“There was a group of kids that did a ‘the gentlemen of Notre Dame Calendar,’ there was a group that did jambalaya sales and sold jambalaya.”

But that’s not all the food that was sold, they also did bake sales, pizza lunches and Nivens says they got fancy.

“We did food truck wars where students did their take on funky desserts that could be featured in a food truck.”

The students are just short of their goal of $50,000 but they continue to give it their best shot. 

Over the past 11 years, students have raised more than $600,000 for student chosen charities.