Matthew Kim, Entertainment Editor
As the cold, foggy, December winter season begins to make its stride to Langley, it is time yet again to launch a yearly charity among mostly the newest 
Grade 8s of WGSS 2017-2018! Warm Hands, Warm Hearts is a charity that WGSS does every winter where new or lightly used winter clothing can be donated from every Grade 8 classroom to provide warmth and comfort to people who aren’t fortunate enough to have that type of clothing. Although it is mainly for Grade 8s to get into the swing of helping out the people in need through charities we do at school, it is not limited to junior students. Other people who want to help out are welcome to do so as charity boxes are available throughout the school.
It’s been recently said that child poverty rate in BC is higher than the national average, according to a new study from a coalition of advocacy groups. Rising from 2014-2016, child poverty rate in British Columbia went from 19.8% to 20.1% which puts it higher than poverty rate relative to the national population, which was 18.5% at the time of 2014. Although the percentage of children in BC living in poverty is only now starting to show some decline, the percentage of children affected by poverty who live in single-parent families stayed the same at a whopping 50.3%.
British Columbia has made no substantial progress in reducing this astounding rate of poverty in children in lone-parent families since 2006, and in fact it has trended upward since 2009,” the coalition reported.
Since the alarming poverty rates were publicly announced, many charities, churches, and non-profit organizations tried their best to reduce the amount of 
poverty and secondary case of homelessness around Langley and British Columbia. However, it wasn’t until about a year ago when the government found that the community meal organizations that churches do in Langley (which involves giving free meals to people who aren’t able to afford food) attracted too many other homeless and poverty-stricken families from nearby cities and further raising the percentage of poverty in Langley. Due to this, most of these churches had to shut down their organizations and many charities found it hard to continue supporting their organization to help those people.
Warm Hands, Warm Hearts is gladly one of those charities that are still standing and can help so many people who don’t have homes or can’t afford warm clothing for the bitter winter. And due to those poverty rates in BC, a little donation can go a long way into making other teens like us happy and thankful in time for Christmas. So please! Let’s make it an effort to help out as much as we can to those in need around us. A percentage of our nation is blessed with the fortune of warm clothing, so let us spread that love to the ones who aren’t as fortunate as we are!
