Surrey radio raises whooping C$790,000 for hospital on Guru Nanak’s birthday

By Asia Samachar Team | CANADA |

This is a beautiful way to celebrate the birthday of Guru Nanak – raising donations for a hospital.

Surrey-based ethnic radio station RED FM staff and volunteers spent the whole day of Nov 12 to tap into the South Asian community of the Canadian city to raise funds for the birthing unit of the Surrey Memorial Hospital.

This was the station’s 13th annual Gurpurab Radiothon to celebrate Guru Nanak’s birthday.

At the end of the day, they raised a whooping C$790,000 for the Mata Tripta Family Birthing Unit, named after Guru Nanak’s mother after a similar donation drive in 2012.

The donation will help the unit to purchase equipment and accessories that will help parents and their newborn babies. The Surrey Hospital Foundation is the busiest surgical site in the Fraser Valley region as it serves some 1.8 million residents.

In 2014, the Gurpurab Radiothon channelled the entire donation raised to equip the hospital’s new stroke unit which was named Guru Ram Das Ji Stroke Unit. Guru Ram Das is the Sikh faith’s fourth guru.

Sikhs globally are celebrating the 550th birthday of Guru Nanak this year.

The radiothon began 13 years ago when the radio station took a bold commitment to raise $2 million for the hospital’s accident & emergency department (A&E).

“We gave a commitment to raise the funds in five years, but we managed to do it in two years,” RED FM president Kulwinder Sanghera said in an interview shared on the hospital’s Facebook.

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