Meet Aavanti, the foundation’s Fulfillment and Marketing coordinator and Uzma, the foundation’s Marketing and fulfillment coordinator. They were our Winter 2021 co-ops, working remotely, and on their last day with the foundation, they wanted to share a bit about how their first-ever co-op term went!

“Hi I’m Aavanti, and I’m a second-year Economics major at the University of Waterloo and I’m Uzma, a second-year majoring in Health Studies at University of Waterloo!

One of Aavanti’s favourite things to do during Quarantine is spending time with her cat, Gatsby. Named after her favourite character from the book The Great Gatsby. Alongside of this, Uzma’s favourite pastime during quarantine would be to look outside her bedroom window and watch the sunset. “I always get such wonderful sunset views and it just reminds me of summer! Sitting on my roof and admiring the view always gives me peace of mind.”

“When we first applied to be co-op’s for the marketing and fulfillment coordinators position at the Grand River Hospital Foundation, we didn't even know what a foundation was! Over the course of our work term, we learnt the importance of having a hospital foundation and the role it plays in our community. And we are glad to be a part of this team even though it was only for 4 months. 

On our first day, our initial thought process was - okay, so we’re probably going to be making some Instagram and Facebook posts, creating some newsletters here and there… seems pretty simple. But soon after we started working, we realized that this job was much more than what meets the eye. We got to work alongside many colleagues from different areas of expertise and gain a wide array of experience! From a little dash of e-commerce, by working on Shopify and helping create and edit pages on the website, mixed with a dash of cause-marketing to help increase revenue for the 50/50 CareNeverStops lottery community event! We gained such a holistic experience that could have not been possible without the guidance and mentorship of our incredible colleagues.

We saw how hard they work in our weekly meetings and that encouraged us to also leave our mark when our time with the foundation ended. We believe we fulfilled this desire when we were the catalyst for our entire team migrating to a new and more efficient collaborative tool away from existing ones. And having achieved this we felt very proud of ourselves! It was an honour to work under such a welcoming and hard-working team, and seeing the community be receptive to their efforts makes us so incredibly proud of our colleagues.

We wish everyone at Grand River Hospital Foundation the best and hope to be back someday!”

Best wishes,

Aavanti and Uzma