Swapping sweets for soap

By Carolyn Enting

Swapping sweets for soap
Olympian Valerie Adams is supporting ecostore's new healthy fundraising initiative Good Soap for a Good Cause.

Ever groan when a colleague approaches you with a box of fund raising chocolate bars and think, ‘I don’t need this but it’s for a good cause’ and then next minute you’ve eaten the whole bar and go back for more. Or you have a box to sell and end up buying the whole box because it’s just easier and then you and your family end up eating it all, along with all the calories.

Well, ecostore’s Malcolm Rands has come up with a new ‘bar’ option for fundraising – bars of soap!

Olympic shot put gold medallist and four-time world champion Valerie Adams is putting the weight of her throw behind the initiative too.

“I understand it’s really tough for groups to raise money and an easy fix is to sell chocolate, sweets and sausage sizzles, but New Zealand’s obesity rates are out of control and injecting more junk food into the community is the last thing our children need,” Adams says. “So when I heard ecostore was working on this healthy initiative I wanted to help get the message out that there is a fundraising initiative for groups to use.”

ecostore’s ‘Good Soap for a Good Cause’ initiative provides groups with $1 profit from every individual soap sold.

“Many of use don’t realise that when we reward with sweets we are actually creating a problem around obesity and early onset of diabetes,” says Rands. “Right now 30 per cent of New Zealand adults (1,069,000) and 10 per cent of our children (79,000) are obese. That’s not just overweight but obese and just under half of those are Maori and Pacific Island children. The Ministry of Health predicts that obesity will become New Zealand’s leading risk to our health in 2016.”

www.ecostore.co.nz/fundraising

Photography by Geoff Osborne

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