I’ve never talked about A Wish To Wed Society on our website, but after last weekend, I just have to! For some reason I’m afraid to come across as bragging when talking about our non-profit work. Which of course is stupid, because the more people know about A Wish To Wed, the better!

It all started with me wanting to volunteer for Wish Upon A Wedding, an organization that organizes weddings for couples where one of the partners is diagnosed with a terminal illness or life altering desease. I quickly learned that they only operate in the US and had no intentions of expanding to Canada.

The idea however kept existing in the back of my mind. One day I talked about it to a befriended wedding planner and suddenly the idea became something that could be a reality! Jelger’s legal background definately helped us a lot, because easy as it seems, to start a registred non-profit you need A LOT of paperwork, as well as 5 board members. The start-up fase didn’t stop after finding board members, as we’d of course needed some money for hard expenses, before we could actually donate a wedding.

When we did raise enough funds, we were facing the dificulty that nobody actually knew about the society! It’s a rather specific group of people that we were trying to reach, so it took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to reach possible couples.

Last weekend, after 1.5 years of pounding the pavement, A Wish To Wed donated it’s first wedding to an amazing couple, Kim and Andrew. I felt so proud of everyone in the board and the amazing vendors who made it happen. And I learned a lot from our couple, who focus on love and gratitude, which shined trough at their wedding day.

The board members have become like family and I’m excited to have these 3 ladies in our lives: Jennifer Greenman (AWW’s wedding planner) who went above and beyond to plan the wedding perfectly and is the sweetest person you’ll ever meet, Tianna Tran who is an outstanding hair- and makeup artist, with a big mouth (I love it!) and an even bigger heart and Neet Aujla who also is an amazing hair- and makeup artist and has a special talent for being a very calming and positive influence on everyone she gets in touch with.

Small ideas can grow very big, especially if you are surrounded with people that are 100% invested in what they do and have a heart of gold.

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P.S: If you are interested in helping A Wish To Wed with your services, don’t hesitate to get in touch at society@awishtowed.com or if you want to donate, you can do that right here.