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Sisters Maya, left, and Emily Froman, package some of their homemade baked goods, which are being sold to raise money for a COVID-19 relief fund at Jewish Family and Child Services, from their home in North York, Ont., on June 24, 2020.Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail

The organizers: Emily and Maya Froman

The project: Raising money for the Jewish Family and Child Service’s COVID-19 Relief Fund

Like most university students, Emily and Maya Froman saw their summer plans fall through after the COVID-19 pandemic struck Canada in March.

Emily had lined up a job at a behavioural economics company in Toronto and her sister Maya planned to work as a camp counsellor before heading to Israel for a volunteer position.

“Everything got cancelled,” said Emily, a bio-mechanical engineering student at Queen’s University. “That’s when this thought kind of arrived that we should do something with our time that would actually benefit people around us.”

The sisters have grown up in a family that loves to bake and they decided to put that passion to use to raise money. They began baking and selling cookies, scones, pies, brownies, butter tarts, challah and baguettes. A neighbour started helping out as well, and soon the Fromans were making up to 50 deliveries a week around the family’s home in Toronto and other parts of the city.

Nearly all of their sales have come through social media and so far they have been pulling in about $1,000 a week in profit, or roughly $4,000 in total. The proceeds go to a COVID-19 relief fund set up by the Jewish Family and Child Services, which provides a range of emergency support services to families struggling to cope with the pandemic.

“It’s going way better than we expected,” Emily said. They’ve been baking twice a week, and using the rest of the time to take orders and make deliveries, although they may have to up the tempo to meet the demand. “It’s only just beginning,” she added.

Emily and Maya, who is also studying at Queen’s, plan to return to university in the fall even though they aren’t sure what to expect. For now, they’ll continue baking and raising as much money as possible all summer. “It’s been a lot of fun and kind of craziness. We didn’t think it would get this far,” Emily said.


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