A local realtor has been pulling together an amazing community-supporting prize-draw in Parry Sound the last two weeks.
The Great Parry Sound Grand Reopening is a chance for residents to win a $25 gift card to one of their favourite participating local businesses in town.
All you gotta do to get in the draw is fill in a store-ballot, take a selfie in your favourite shop(with your mask on), post it to the event’s Facebook page, tag the store and add #parrysoundisopen.
Shirlene Johnston, Realtor with Exp Realty’s All Points North Group, told MyParrySoundNow what motivated her to organize the event.
“I just thought as a realtor I had an absolutely fantastic year, as did most Realtors, so I wanted to give back to the community. At first, I just decided I was going to take $500 and buy $25 gift certificates and then have a draw in the hopes that people would get out, start shopping again and help spread the stores’ social media to help businesses that have been shut down get a little bit of a boost,’ She said.
Johnston said after mentioning the event to a town official, councillors and Mayor Jamie McGarvey joined in by donating more gift-cards to stores for the draw.
The event kicked off on March 8th with the prize draw set for Tuesday.
“The draw is on the 23rd; I will go into each store and draw a ballot. Some stores actually have more than one gift certificate because some councillors decided to support some of the same stores[…] we had a bit of a challenge with the restaurants because some of them are still limited to take out, so just today in talking with the counsellors we thought, why don’t we do a separate initiative to help the restaurants once we’re out of this Red Zone,” said Johnston.
She finished by saying, “You can just go out and you don’t have to spend a dime to do so, put your mask on, sanitize, do all the COVID protocols. Go out, fill in a ballot, take a selfie or take a picture of a product or whatever, and put it on social media, tag the store that you’re in, and help them by spreading the word and spreading the love; but do it safely,”
