The money donated was raised through sales of their homemade hand sanitizer (Photo: Shaun Penner)

By Shane Clausing

hand sanitizer

Latitude 55 donates $10,000 to Community Foundation of Northwestern Alberta

May 17, 2020 | 5:30 AM

Grande Prairie distillers Latitude 55 have donated $10,000 to the Community Foundation of Northwestern Alberta.

Back in March when the COVID-19 pandemic began, Latitude 55 and the Broken Oak Distilling Company teamed up together to help make hand sanitizer for residents in Grande Prairie to help meet the rapidly growing demand for the product locally.

Between the two companies they were able to sell around 4,000 bottles, which combined into sales worth $21,000.. Dennis Warren, the VP of Operations and Sales for Latitude 55, says that they wanted the sanitizer to help as many people as possible.

“We purchased all the bottles and made the sanitizer and labelled it and posted it on our websites that both Broken Oak and Latitude 55 are giving away free hand sanitizer and if you’re able to do so, give a donation that we are going to give back to the community of Grande Prairie.”

“Some people donated $1, some people donated $10 and some donated $100 and some people didn’t donate anything because they just didn’t have the money. We were happy to give it to people that donated money and people who didn’t have money.”

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Both companies made it clear that they did not want to benefit from making the sanitizer, so they wanted to give back to the community.

In the middle of April, the Broken Oak Distilling Company donated $11,000 to the Salvation Army Food Bank, and at the start of May Latitude 55 made their $10,000 donation to the Community Foundation of Grande Prairie.

Warren spoke about why they decided to donate to the Community Foundation of Northwestern Alberta.

“We reached out to the community and did a Facebook post on who they felt, in their opinions, would be the best fit for the money that we were going to donate.”

“We had a number of different suggestions from the people of Grande Prairie and it was a tough decision. We understood that the biggest picture of how the community foundation was actually hitting a lot of these charities, so we decided to go with the Community Foundation because they are also receiving donations from the federal government on a program.”

“This way, we feel we were able to get out to more organizations in need by choosing the community foundation.”

The Community Foundation helps charities in Northwestern Alberta like the Grande Prairie Friendship Centre, Salvation Army, Bandaged Paws and homeless shelters in the region.

Warren says that the distillery will continue to make and sell hand sanitizer in the future as another option if people ever need it.