It might be a small gesture but it goes a long way when showing support for those working around the clock battling the pandemic.
To show gratitude for health care workers and support staff, Wellington Brewery has been dropping off coupons toward free beer at Guelph General Hospital and the West End Community Centre and Skyjack vaccination clinics.
“It's just our tiny little small contribution to the hard work,” said Karyn Boscariol, communications coordinator at Wellington Brewery.
“Our intention was just to help support healthcare workers, it's not even a big, it's a coupon for a free beer so a $5 coupon with no minimum purchase so they could just come into the brewery and swap the coupon down and get a free beer.”
The brewery plans on handing out 2,000 coupons in total. So far, it has distributed approximately 1,200 coupons. Boscariol said she plans on getting the coupons to other vaccination clinics in Guelph as well.
Boscariol said originally the brewery began this initiative for staff workers at GGH and had a large number of coupons remaining a month ago. She said the brewery always wanted to drop off free beer at the hospital but handing out stacks of beer isn’t feasible and so they made coupons instead.
“It felt important to us, knowing that Guelph was going to be very overtaxed because COVID numbers were so high and because they had people coming in from the GTA to be treated at GGH. We felt like it was a really important time to support health care workers,” said Boscariol.
In May, the brewery raised $4,300 for the GGH by donating 25 cents from every Special Pale Ale can they sold in addition to optional donations at the online checkout store.
They also highlighted different health care workers from Guelph each week on their social media.
“So that was interesting because we sort of got a perspective on lots of different areas and different roles that people play and how COVID numbers and everything was affecting their job,” said Boscariol.