About Us

Our History

The Better Days Society was started in 2004 by a group of Vancouver, B.C. businessmen, who wanted to raise money to help children with challenging medical conditions. Our first beneficiary was a 5 year old girl who had one of the most extreme cases of epilepsy in Canada. Conventional treatments did not appear to be helping with her symptoms and the family had researched “alternative medical” solutions. Unfortunately, these alternative methods are not covered by the Health Care plan and the costs were too high for the family to proceed. Better Days Society was established to raise money to assist this and other families to receive support that might make better days for them.

The society raises money in a variety of methods. To date, we have run golf tournaments and a raffles. As well, we continue to get cash donations from caring and concerned individuals who want to support our cause. As a Canadian Registered Charity, we are authorized to issue tax receipts to any Canadian-resident donors for any cash donation.

We are a small organization, with 5 Directors (all volunteers) handling the administrative tasks, there is virtually no overhead, which means that all of the funds raised go directly to the kids we are supporting. Our goal is to support a small number of specific situations, so that our efforts can reduce the stress those families are enduring!

Our Current Program

In the summer of 2018, we were introduced to the management at Ronald McDonald House BC (RMH). After completing a tour of the facility (if you haven’t gone through it, they offer tours to the public), we sat down with management to see how the Better Days Society (BDS) could assist some of the families staying at their facility, but still have control over how our funds are allocated.

For over thirty years, RMH has been providing accommodation for seriously ill children and their families when they must travel to Vancouver for their child’s major treatment. The families that stay there are still responsible for their own food, transportation, clothing and medical costs not covered by the health care plan.

In many cases, single parents are having to walk away from their lives in order to move to RMH and care for their sick child. Accordingly, many of the things we take for granted, become additional challenges for these families while they are already going through the stress of a seriously ill child.

This is where BDS is able to step in. We are able to review various family needs and provide financial support in these “basics in life” – grocery store gift certificates, paying for travel costs to get to RMH, paying for additional medical services not covered by the health care, gift certificates for clothing.

Each story we are presented, is always a unique set of circumstances, that leave us all more motivated and inspired to help as many of these families as our funds allow!