After a 20-year run, the Quyon Jamfeast Committee has decided to disband and donate its remaining funds to community organizations. The ceremony debursing the funds was held at the Quyon Maison de la Famille in Quyon last Wednesday.

During the ceremony, the Quyon Lions a Club, the Quyon Community Community Association, and the Maison de la Famille each received a $2000 cheque from the funds of Jamfest’s remaining bank account.

“We’ve decided to shut it down,” said Heather Desabrais on behalf of the committee. “The last couple of years has given us the opportunity to work towards our paying off expenses, anything that we’ve needed to get out of the way is done. So we had a surplus profit in the account and decided to distribute it amongst three deserving committees.”

Desabrais explained the decision to end Jamfest was come to for a variety of reasons.

“Just at the time of covid we had decided that we were going to shut it down. The lack of volunteers, the one year with the flood, water issues, no fences, and the municipality were becoming a little bit of a challenge,” she said. “A lot of our members are older and we didn’t have a big number of youth joining, so it was really getting difficult.”

The Quyon Lions a Club, the Quyon Community Community Association, and the Quyon Maison de la Famille were chosen by the committee due to their good work in the community.

“We completely appreciate the donation,” said Sandra Bennet of the Maison de la Famille. “We will be using the funds to go towards our snowsuit fund, which is a huge demand in this area. The snowsuit fund is a program that we run here ourselves that isn’t funded by a government program so we have to work really hard to be able to raise some money.”

“On behalf of the Lions Club we’d like to say thank you very much for this donation, it is really well appreciated. It is going to help us a great deal because we do help a lot with the community, donate a lot of money and donate a lot of help,” said Eric Provost.

“On behalf of the Quyon Community Association, we’d like to say a huge thank you to you as well. We appreciate getting this. We are just up and running. We’re in our first six months of getting started. But rest assured all funds that we’re raising are going straight back into the community with events, beautifying the town and just getting it back to what the town was pre-covid,” said Brenda Clarke.

Desabrais also explained that the Jamfest’s land was donated to the Municipality of Pontiac and that they would host a new Jamfest in some form in the future. She also explained that whatever remained in the Jamfest bank account would still be donated to a deserving organization after a few details were worked out.

“We had a lot of fun doing it and we’ve always made it work, rain or shine. People always had good things to say about it,” concluded Desabrais.

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