Spotlight on Our Volunteers
Ankur Gupta & Garima Verma
In this edition we highlight a husband and wife couple who both volunteer with Kawasaki Disease Canada.
Ankur Gupta is Treasurer of the organization and a member of its Board of Directors. His wife, Garima Verma, is a member of the Awareness & Education Committee.
The couple moved to Kitchener when they got married in 2015. Verma moved from India and Ankur from Toronto. Their families remain in India.
Garima has a Bachelor's degree in English Literature "but my passion is baking. I also have a diploma in bakery and confectionery."
Ankur completed an Engineering degree in India and after two years working as a research engineer, he decided to pursue an MBA in finance which brought him to Canada. He graduated from the Schulich School of Business and is currently working at ScotiaMcLeod as a Wealth Management Associate.
While in India, Garima had a home bakery where she catered small events and sold her baked goods at festivals. Currently, she works remotely as a part-time Project Manager at an IT firm and part time as a decorator at a Kitchener bakery.
"Back in India," said Garima, "we both worked for non-government organizations working on various causes including teaching children from low income families mathematics and how to read and write in Hindi and English."
"When we moved to Canada, I heard about Kawasaki Disease Canada through my network at work," said Ankur. "This is when we found out more about the condition, got interested, and joined Kawasaki Disease Canada last year.
"The reason we wanted to be a part of this organization was because we had no idea about the existence of the disease earlier," said Ankur. "It made us want to work towards making people aware of it and to recognize its symptoms."
"Since becoming a part of the organization, we have tried to do our bit by attending awareness campaigns and sharing ideas about how to raise awareness," Garima concluded.