Say Yes! To Kids hits stride: ‘‘All these people believe in what you’re doing’
A national campaign spearheaded by the Anglican Foundation of Canada (AFC) to raise funds for local child and youth ministry, Say Yes! To Kids (SYTK) began as a one-time initiative in 2021 before becoming an annual campaign the following year. But 2026 felt different for AFC staff, executive director Scott Brubacher says.
“We felt like this year the church got it,” Brubacher says. “The donations were coming faster and more immediately and it felt more organically charged … We felt like, ‘Ah, people get it now.’ It took a few years for us to get this cranked up and running, so we’re excited to see where it goes from here.”
That shift found both quantitative expression—in the record-breaking $165,000 that 24 fundraising teams across the Anglican Church of Canada collected in this year’s campaign—and qualitative, as Anglicans told the Journal how national support through SYTK had instilled them with new levels of confidence, motivation and empowerment to strengthen local youth ministries.
SYTK involves local teams raising funds for child and youth programs through peer-to-peer fundraising, in which team members reach out to family, friends and others for donations. The AFC matches the amount each team raises up to $1,000. Every team keeps 80 per cent of the money raised for a local project, while the remaining 20 per cent funds national ministries for Indigenous youth such as the Sacred Beginnings gathering.
Choir tour and Camp Huron top 2026 fundraising
Two of the most successful campaigns this year raised funds for a tour to the United Kingdom by the youth choir of Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria, B.C.; and for Camp Huron, an overnight and day summer camp operated by the diocese of Huron.
The Christ Church Cathedral youth choir—which consists of students from ages 14 to 18 who receive a scholarship and music education tied to the cathedral’s affiliated school—embarked on their second U.K. residency this summer. Along with the cathedral choir, the youth choir sang daily services at Lincoln Cathedral and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
Philippa Carrie, the mother of one of the choristers, led the choir tour fundraiser, which raised more than $12,000 to cover travel costs for the two-week trip in July by six youth choir members. She chaperoned the youth on what she calls a “life-changing” pilgrimage.
“Being able to lead that weekly worship where people have pilgrimaged for hundreds of years, seeing that they’re part of that bigger legacy, was pretty incredible for the kids,” Carrie says.
The youth choir could not have undertaken the trip without national support through SYTK, she adds. “Knowing that you have the support of the Anglican Church behind you … that’s a pretty powerful message for any kid … All these people believe in what you’re doing.”
The largest fundraiser this year was for Camp Huron, currently celebrating its 80th anniversary. A local SYTK team raised more than $42,000 for the camp at Lake Huron, including a $10,000 matching gift from the Huron Anglican Church Women (ACW).
Rodger Moran, manager of advancement for Camp Huron, says the most the camp had previously raised in one year was $26,000. He says the intergenerational aspect of the ministry helps attract community support, with many young people having parents and grandparents who attended the camp. People “want to be able to pass that on to the next generation because it’s something really special,” Moran says.
SYTK has further raised the profile of Camp Huron. Moran says the Anglican Foundation helps share its story beyond people on diocesan mailing lists or social media channels.
“We’re reaching a broader audience, which I think is really quite something for us,” he says. Moran says the community is “thrilled” that the AFC not only provides money for bursaries “to help open doors to kids that might not be able to afford to go to camp otherwise,” but helps fund other ministries across Canada through SYTK.
Halifax youth programs: ‘People like to belong to something exciting’
The Cathedral Church of All Saints in Halifax, N.S. is one of the most dedicated SYTK participants, raising money for five youth-focused community outreach programs over the last five years.
Early on, the cathedral team raised funds for the Ward 5 Neighbourhood Centre Summer Day Camp, which provides day camp opportunities for children in a low-income area of Halifax; and the Newcomers’ Recreation Fund, which helps fund recreation activities for new arrivals to the city, including refugees. Cate Berry, a member of the congregational council and Alongside Hope representative at the cathedral, says the latter program helped provide a guitar for a child who played guitar in their home country but had to leave it behind when fleeing to Canada.
Since Berry took over as co-chair of the cathedral’s SYTK team three years ago, she has taken part in three additional campaigns. The first raised money for the THRIVE Girls’ Choir, a faith-based choir for girls from preteens through high school which performed with the Nova Scotia Symphony that year. The second helped fund two summer camps for The Youth Project, a non-profit charity that supports programming for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults aged 25 and under.
In 2026, the All Saints team supported the launch of the Anchor Youth Space Halifax-Chebucto, a free mental health and substance use support centre for young people between the ages of 12 and 25. Partnering with the YWCA Halifax and Anglicans Powering Potential—the latter describes itself as a gender-inclusive successor to the diocesan ACW board—the cathedral team raised $6,945, surpassing its $5,000 goal by 40 per cent, AFC development and communications officer Michelle Hauser says.
Berry says SYTK provides valuable financial, moral and administrative support through the AFC. “It’s been personally great for me to meet people at the foundation who are willing and able to offer ideas and advice … It also helps for us to be able to say that we’re getting that support from the Anglican Foundation,” she says. “That has a benefit to our own cathedral donors and for people in the greater community to understand that this is a real national focus of the Anglican Church.”
“I think that it gives it another level of legitimacy when it’s something that’s happening right across the country,” Berry adds. “People like to belong to something exciting.”
Diocese of Saskatchewan funds Vacation Bible School
While many teams work at the parish level, the diocese of Saskatchewan participates in SYTK through a diocese-wide fundraiser for its travelling Vacation Bible School (VBS) ministry. The VBS hires four students from the University of King’s College Chapel to travel across northern Saskatchewan over the summer, partnering with local Anglican congregations to teach children the basics of Christianity in lessons that incorporate prayer, music, storytelling, skits and a free meal.
Archdeacon Brody Albers, who oversees the diocesan VBS, says fundraising through SYTK helps cover wages, travel and accommodation for the students, who often receive their first exposure to Anglicanism through the University of King’s College Chapel. Many VBS alumni have gone on to receive ministry placements and eventually become clergy in the diocese.
In leading the VBS, which prepares many children in the diocese for confirmation, students also gain cross-cultural experience by visiting many rural and Indigenous communities, Albers says. He notes the recent example of students who were invited to a powwow after leading a VBS at Muskoday First Nation.
A former member of the AFC board of directors, Albers says SYTK helps cover much of the estimated $30,000 cost of running the VBS each summer. For a small diocese with limited staff, he says, AFC support for tasks such as publicizing the fundraiser “is a huge blessing … because our ability to run something like that is just so limited.”
‘Empowering model’ transforms B.C. parish
St. John the Divine Anglican Church in Squamish, B.C. illustrates the degree to which participation in SYTK can transform parish life.
The Rev. Cameron Gutjahr, who serves as rector, says four years ago St. John the Divine was a smaller, older congregation that wished to connect to children and families in Squamish, —a goal it named after discernment through prayer. A memorial gift allowed St. John’s to update its nursery space and introduce “Tot Time,” a free weekly drop-in play group for preschool-aged children with their caregivers.
Gutjahr says when he first heard about SYTK, “I thought, ‘Wow, that sounds like a really empowering model’ … Now we have the resources to fundraise ourselves and a little rallying cry in some ways to raise funds in the community—but also to talk about the ministries that we’re doing and tell some stories about it.”
Its first SYTK campaign helped St. John’s support Tot Time, and the parish subsequently built on each year’s success. As Tot Time grew more popular, St. John’s began offering “Family Feasts,” in which families gathered for a meal alongside Bible stories and discussion, songs, prayer and crafts. A second SYTK campaign helped support the Family Feasts, covering costs such as food.
The influx of families compelled St. John’s to hire a children, youth and family ministry worker who supported the creation of a monthly youth group, which a third SYTK campaign helped resource. In its 2026 campaign, the St. John’s team raised more than $3,700 against a $2,000 goal to further support youth ministry through regular gatherings of middle and high school students, with plans to soon run its first day camp.
Looking back after seven years as rector, Gutjahr is struck by the change at St. John’s. “I’m like, ‘Wow, we have a thriving children and youth programme, with a good amount of volunteers and engagement with the parish.’ But that’s been a long time coming.” He says he is grateful for AFC support in helping the parish achieve its goals.
“The matching grant really makes a big difference and is really motivating,” Gutjahr says, noting that the diocese of New Westminster ACW has made significant donations to the campaigns. Surpassing their fundraising goal this year, he says, “just shows that people care about this. It matters to them.”
“The church is growing pretty noticeably and getting younger,” Gutjahr says. After participating in successive SYTK campaigns, he adds, people in the community now “know what it takes … They know it needs investment to continue to do these things and to connect and serve families in the community.”
Teams learn from past campaigns
Brubacher says such experience and the campaign’s “track record of success” helped drive record-breaking 2026 participation in SYTK. Since the AFC began the peer-to-peer fundraising program in 2022, he says, the campaign has steadily increased in visibility and built deeper trust.
“People want to be generous … I think when people joined us in the first or second year, it was taking a bit of a chance,” Brubacher says. “We were trying something new. This was not something that had been done before. But we wanted to give it a shot and see if it would work, and it turns out it did.
“Now we have people coming back for their third, fourth, fifth campaign because they do see how successful it is. At the same time, we have new people coming in and wanting to try it, see if it works for them.”
Teams that have participated more than once in SYTK, Brubacher says, now have a better sense of how to run campaigns.
“It does take a bit of work,” he says. “You have to put in a bit of effort locally to actually raise those funds locally. You have to be communicating, you have to be putting stuff on social media, you have to make some phone calls, maybe do an announcement in the church. The ones that get that and are successful keep coming back … Some of them are setting even larger goals for next year.”
Archdeacon Blair Peever, incumbent of St. Thomas’ Anglican Church in Kingston, Ont., says his parish’s Messy Church—a monthly gathering in which families gather for an evening dinner, parents enjoy conversation and children hear a Bible story with themed games and crafts—is “supported completely” through its participation in SYTK over several years.
In 2026 the St. Thomas team raised $4,900 on a $3,000 goal, helping cover costs such as food and craft supplies. Several families, often unable to attend Sunday morning services due to scheduling, attend Messy Church at St. Thomas’, which has garnered donations through SYTK, including one from a community group who liked having a program for children in the neighbourhood, Peever says.
People have “been very generous in giving to that campaign,” Peever says. “They like the idea of the matching funds as well. That certainly helps. But [national support] gives it a bit more of a profile.”
