A requirement to complete their course and graduate for an administrative assistant class at Red River College in Winkler turned into a successful campaign for a local non-profit.

To graduate, the students needed to do a practicum, but due to COVID-19, they were not able to.

Administrative Assistant student, Irene Harder says, in place of the practicums, the college partnered with Genesis House, and the students were then given assignments.

Harder was the team lead in a group of five that put together an online auction in support of the women's shelter. She says they had a four- week window to plan the project. Two and a half weeks to organize everything, gather donations and spread the word. They had one week to hold the auction, which wrapped up this past Sunday.

"Angela from Genesis House, she was hoping for $1,000, but I wanted to get as much as possible for them because they had to say goodbye to $10,000 worth of fundraising this year because of COVID," says Harder. "So I wanted to get as much as possible, and we were able to get over $6,100."

Genesis House Executive Director, Ang Braun says it was amazing what they were able to accomplish. "They just blew that out of the water. There was five students working on that project and they most certainly were able to maximize the talents of each student in the position they gave them on the team."

Harder says the community was a huge part of what made the auction a success in the short amount of time they had. In total 99 items were donated for auction. "If it wouldn't have been for them, we would not have been able to do this."

Braun says because of the timing of the auction, and with the students needing to reach out to businesses for auction items, it was really hard to judge how this would go. "The piece that was unknown for all of us at that point, was how hard has this (COVID-19) impacted the business community? But unbelievable. The community matched the enthusiasm of the students. It was just awesome."

Genesis House does not have a storefront, and therefore, Braun says events like this help bring awareness to the shelter and what they do. "Really that is really valuable for us, and for families that might need the shelter."

Meanwhile, the other 4 of the 9 Administrative Assistant students teamed up to tackle a project that's been sitting on the back-burner for years. Braun says 2020 was going to be the year she was going to get to it, but with COVID-19, there just hasn't been the opportunity.

"What they did for us is reformat our policy and procedure manual, as well as our training manual." Braun says the students made one document out of a "hodgepodge" of material that's been added here and there over time. "We can edit it, we can continue to work, it's a living document all in one place. I said to the students, this will live on literally forever in our organization."