The Life Skills class at John Barsby Community School runs a Snack Shack selling chips, pop and candy at lunch time and before and after school. Each week they make a tidy little profit from their enterprise.

When they heard about the Your Move Campaign being organized by students across the district in support of AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe, they found a place to spend some of their profits. They also became the Barsby sales outlet for Your Move tee shirts -- See www.nanaimointeract.com for more information on the project.

When I visited and showed them pictures of the orphans they would be supporting, they became even more enthusiastic. Soon they were making posters to promote the tee shirt sales and shortly after that, created a partnership with the Barsby Student Council to sell tee shirts in the cafeteria.

The class has already raised enough money to feed one of the orphans for a year and also pay their school fees. At this point it looks like they will also be able to sponsor at least one other.

Isn’t it amazing what a class full of Hidden Heroes can do when they are given a chance?

On a sad note, the Mid Island region lost one of its Hidden Heroes this past week. Bruce Mitchell was the principal at Dover Bay Secondary School until his retirement in 2001. After that he continued to mentor a number of young administrators both here and around the world. He was also an active and highly valued member of the Hidden Heroes Education Society’s board of directors until the last days of his life.

As I said in a column I wrote last July, “Perhaps Bruce’s wife, Pattie, best sums up the kind of man Bruce is, ‘Every Sunday evening for as long as I can remember,’ she told me, ‘Bruce would sit down at his desk and make several calls to students, parents and staff members. For example he would call a drama student to tell them he’d seen them mentioned in the paper, or a parent to let them know their son or daughter had achieved well on a test, or a coach to thank them for spending their weekend with a team.’”

Bruce was an exceptional mentor who believed in the power of acknowledgement, acknowledging the strengths of those he worked with and mentoring them through their challenges while also letting them learn from their own mistakes.

After I wrote the column on Bruce several months ago, Ramona McKean who had taught at Dover for many years sent the following email to Bruce.

“To me you are not a Hidden Hero; you are a bonafide out in the open hero!!,” she wrote, “I sat in Tim Horton's at Southgate 1 1/2 hours ago and happened across Bill Robinson's tribute to you. Lovely! Well deserved. Now Bill's words from Pattie will give me the needed nudge to do something I may not have done otherwise. Last night in the newspaper, I saw an announcement that a former student of mine had earned a Masters degree. I never did meet his parents though I taught him twice. Now I shall give them a call this evening. Who knows? Maybe he will be there!”

Ramona did call the student’s parents and had a long chat. Soon after that she got a letter from him and this Christmas when he comes home with his fiancé, he will drop by for a visit.

This is just one example of Bruce’s positive role modelling and there’s no doubt that his energy will continue to impact hundreds and thousands of us for many years to come.