WHO WE ARE

WeDoSomething was founded to replace online despair with real-time action.

The day that 3-year old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach marked the moment that Sophie Tarnowska’s need to do something about the refugee crisis overcame her anguish about how to do it. That night she emailed her friends to ask if they would help her plan the first Eat + do good, unaware that she was planting the seeds for her non-profit.

By then Syrian refugees had been drowning at sea and abandoned at borders for months, and yet all we could do was to show that we cared by sharing heartbreaking images and articles on social media. 

Sophie had visited Damascus only three months before the civil war broke out in Syria, and both her father and stepmother had been refugees - so donating money through a website didn’t seem like enough:''I realized that if my online community and I shared a sense of powerlessness, we probably also shared something more positive: a desire to do something about it.'' 

But how do you ask people who have busy lives and sometimes small budgets to give time and money? You design the kinds of events you yourself would make time (and money) for, and use them to raise money to combat news headlines that drive you crazy. 

''For our first fun-raiser, my friends and I cooked a Syrian mezze for  fifty people. We raised almost CD$7,000.00 for Doctors Without Borders Canada for their work in Syria, thanks to a donor who matched our funds.''

That first event made it easy for people to help by combining something they loved to do - attend a dinner party - with something they wanted to do - help refugees.  The result was a meal that nourished our conscience as well as our stomachs. 

Since then, WeDoSomething has worked with and for refugees and asylum seekers, the indigenous community, hurricane victims, Montreal's hungry. We've worked to combat the ongoing indigenous suicide crisis, to support those with depression and anxiety disorders, and more.