Carried on for many years by different people in the community, the Angel Tree project has been a part of the Pontiac and a community effort that has held up to this day.

This year the Angel Tree Committee welcomes new . . .

co-chairs Samantha Oxley, who is a program manager at Natural Resources Canada and Megan Coleman, a full-time stay-at-home mom. The two co-chairs are running the project with eight other volunteers.

They originally heard about it when Rhonda Meisner, who helped run the project with a few of her friends for the past couple of years, reached out to their Home and School Committee and asked to see if anyone was interested. There were interested people, but no one wanted to lead it and so Coleman and Oxley decided to run it together.

“Megan and I really wanted to see this project continue because we see the value, what it’s bringing to these children,” said Oxley.

After a hard year with COVID-19 and being short-staffed, Meisner said she had to walk away because it was a lot for her to juggle, but she also didn’t want the project to stop running. “I just needed somebody else with fresh eyes on it to be excited about it. And they’re excited about it,” she said.

Coleman and Oxley, who had recently moved to Shawville to be close to family, met each other on the Home and School Committee and through helping each other, Oxley said, “we’ve become very close in a very short period of time [and] thought we’d be a really good team to take this on together.”

For anyone who doesn’t know about the program, it is a charitable organization aimed at helping families in need. The way it works is a friend, teacher, community member or anyone else can nominate a family needing some help this Christmas. The organizers then take the age and interest of each child and it’s put on an angel and hung on a tree in a few different locations around the Pontiac.

“Members of the community can select an angel off the tree to purchase gifts for that child and then the gifts get distributed to families,” said Oxley.

What they are doing differently this year is expanding the regional parameters to include Angels located in: Bristol, Bryson, Campbell’s Bay, Quyon, Clarendon, Shawville, and they did accept outside their parameters on a case-to-case basis.

They were able to help more children this year, reaching 50 children from 19 families, doing that while also getting to know the community, Megan said, “it’s kind of a learning curve for us.”

Not only does it help folks in the community, but Oxley highlights those businesses benefit too. The project is, “putting money back into the local economy, which I think is a really great thing in a small town because the businesses themselves are very supportive of the initiative and the money goes back into those organizations,” said Oxley.

Community members can continue to pick up an angel and purchase a gift for a child up until Dec. 12, and trees can be seen at both Shawville Giant Tiger and Stedmans V & S. They are offering a pickup location at the United Church either the night of Dec. 14 or 16 said, Coleman.

For the two moms, choosing to take the lead on this project was through seeing its importance in this community. “To lose a program like this in an area where there is quite a bit of need would be a really heartbreaking thing for not just the children but also for their parents,” said Oxley.

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