A Trivia Night held on Friday night packed the Vimy Room at the Royal Canadian Legion in Weyburn. The event raised $4,000 for the CMHA Weyburn branch.

“The night went amazing,” said Trivia Night organizer Lisa Loustel, founder of the local chapter of A Walk to Remember, event sponsor. “Considering it was our first trivia night, it was awesome. It was so much fun, I can’t wait to do it again.”

The Vimy Room at the Royal Canadian Legion was packed full with 22 teams competing for the Trivia Night fundraiser for CMHA (photo courtesy of Lisa Loustel).

Loustel noted that the event’s emcee managed to keep the flow with 22 teams throughout the evening, posing 100 questions for the jovial crowd, most of whom were in team costumes. 

The "Spice Girls" (L-R) Britney Fisher, Kristy Bourassa, Shandel Clark and Nicole Spagrud, was the team that one best costume at the Trivia Night event (photo courtesy of Lisa Loustel).

“A big thank you to Jessica Jack, she was amazing that night,” said Loustel. “She did such a good job, we were just so happy that she could come and help out, she just kept everything flowing, it was awesome.”

Jessica Jack was emcee for the Trivia Night held on Friday at the Legion (photo courtesy of Lisa Loustel).

The event included silent auction items donated by more than 30 local businesses and home businesses. Co-organizer Julie Little noted that businesses were more than willing to generously donate items for the event.

The committee who helped to make the Trivia Night possible also included Julie Little, Mary Ann Flaaten, Alaina Flaaten and Trudy Morken.

“We ended up, in the end, after our silent auction and all of the entry fees, and people paying for their mulligans, we ended up giving a cheque to Canadian Mental Health Association today for $4,000,” Loustel said.

Costumes were creative for Trivia Night (photo courtesy of Jessica Jack).

Tasha Collins of the CMHA Weyburn Branch said the funds will be put to good use locally.

“The funds will be put towards SafeTALK workshops, which is suicide alertness for everyone, as well as building a resource library to provide some support for families who have lost a child,” said Collins.

“At this current time, we do actually run a program called Compassionate Friends, which meets the second Monday of every month, and that is for parents who have lost a child,” she noted.

Collins said Compassionate Friends has run since February, but that it has not been highly attended as many are not yet aware of the program’s existence in Weyburn.

“CMHA had been approached to ask about resources for parents who had lost a child,” explained Collins. “We didn’t have any resources, but I did do some reaching out, and we found somebody.”

“Compassionate Friends is a non-profit organization that runs across Canada and CMHA wanted to be a part of bringing Compassionate Friends to Weyburn,” she said. “We definitely know that there are parents within our community who have gone through the loss of a child, and may need some help and some healing and some hope, and they can get all of those things through that group.”

She added that some funds from Trivia Night may go towards that group, to Safe TALK, and also to building the resource library for parents who have lost a child.

Collins said the CMHA is open to accepting donations for their resource library.

“If anybody has those resources and they are willing to donate them into our library, those are things that we would definitely appreciate,” she said.

 

Trivia Night organizers said they plan to do the event again, but next year with a bigger venue (photo courtesy of Jessica Jack).

Loustel said the organizing committee for A Walk to Remember is still in the process of determining if this year’s event will proceed, as most of the usual fundraising done at the Walk was accomplished at the Trivia Night event. If it does, it will be more simple, for the walk and the balloon release to remember the babies who were lost too soon.