Two young kids review Violet’s Song, a new book written by Lizz Bryce and Duke Chang of CanadaHelps that seeks to provide an antidote to the loneliness epidemic, one act of kindness at a time.
Violet’s Song, by Duke Chang and Lizz Bryce; illustrated by Sakshi Mangal. CanadaHelps, 2025; 36 pages; ISBN 978-1-0695374-0-9
—with files from Franny and Felix Riley
Violet’s Song is a story about a bird and a squirrel and their other animal friends trying to solve a problem. Or, according to my five-year-old daughter, “The bird broke her wing and the animals were pretty generous trying to make her a sling.”
Read another way, it’s a story about simpler, more caring times. Someone in the community has a problem. Their neighbours notice – and help.
But that’s not the reality for everyone these days. Roughly half of Canadians now report they feel always or sometimes lonely, with one in seven Canadians falling into the “always lonely” camp. A 2024 survey conducted for YMCA Canada and the YMCA of Greater Toronto found that 60% of Canadians feel disconnected from their community. So it’s no wonder that for some people, the idea that someone would notice their suffering and step up to help them is a nostalgic notion from a bygone world.
The story is meant to encourage children to see themselves as helpers in their homes and communities, and help families be more intentional with modelling these behaviours.
Lizz Bryce, CanadaHelps/Violet’s Song co-author
But Violet’s Song, a new children’s book from Canada Helps, offers a story of hope that it doesn’t always have to be that way. The book aims to inspire a new generation to be generous: to recognize need and be empathetic and caring in response. “We need young people to be part of this shift towards a culture of generosity,” says Lizz Bryce, one of the authors and senior vice president of community and strategic initiatives at CanadaHelps. “The story is meant to encourage children to see themselves as helpers in their homes and communities, and help families be more intentional with modelling these behaviours.”
In the story, that plays out like this: Violet, a songbird, sings every morning – until one day she doesn’t. Her neighbours notice and find that she’s hurt. They rally together to help. The book follows the animal community as they strategize ways to help their injured friend – sharing sticks from a beaver lodge, wool from a sheep, silk from a spider’s web, and so on – sometimes grumbling slightly at the inconvenience. Spoiler alert: they help Violet in the end.
But Violet’s Song’s message about generosity doesn’t apply only to kids, Bryce says. It’s an attempt to spark wider conversations about generosity across the charitable sector. “We work directly with thousands of charities and millions of donors,” she says. “We are going to continue to invest in public messaging around generosity. But we can’t do everything.” She hopes organizations across the charitable and no-profit sector will invest in promoting generosity that goes beyond specific causes – especially as challenges in the sector mount.
“Collaboration is important,” Bryce says.
CanadaHelps broadens its focus
For CanadaHelps, Violet’s Song is part of a step in a new direction for the organization that has long worked to facilitate donations to charities across Canada and to provide tools to support Canadian charities in online fundraising.
“We just celebrated our 25th anniversary, and we’re the largest donation platform in Canada, and that’s really been our focus for the last 25 years: making giving really easy for donors and giving charities the tools they need,” says Bryce, who has worked in the sector for more than 12 years, noting that CanadaHelps is itself a registered charity. “Looking at the next 25 years, we really wanted to broaden our focus to – of course, still support financial generosity – but to look at generosity more broadly.”
CanadaHelps’s annual giving report has some alarm bells ringing on that front, noting that Canadians over 65 account for more than a third of all donations in 2025, and more than half of donor dollars. At the same time, the total value of donations was the highest amount ever recorded – but more money is coming from fewer people. “The long-term trend of fewer Canadians giving remains a concern,” the report concludes.
How are we going to get more young people involved? And really, how are we going to get more people giving?
Lizz Bryce
“We know from our giving report that we do every year that fewer adults are making charitable gifts,” Bryce says. “That number has gone down every year. And the ones who are giving are those older people, and they’re the people who have more money, so they’re making these larger gifts, and they’re really sort of carrying the whole thing.”
Violet’s Song is one step in the direction of reigniting passion for charity and generosity in the youngest generation. “How are we going to get more young people involved? And really, how are we going to get more people giving?” Bryce says of the motivation for the book. “It’s not just increasing the gifts of the existing people; it’s getting more people engaged with the work of the charitable sector that’s so critical to everybody’s life.”
‘You could pick bouquets for people’: five-year-old book reviewer
My kids are three and five (three and a half and five and a half if you ask them). I wondered how the book and its message would resonate with them. So one day, in the lead-up to the holiday season, we sat down together to read Violet’s Song. This is their very first book review.
There was consensus between them: the pictures looked good. The animal sounds were fun. Deer poop is not a good idea (read the book to understand).
“I think it’s good to help the bird,” says Felix, who is three. “I liked Violet: how she’s singing and how she makes the world so cheerful,” says Franny, who’s five. “I like how the other animals are being so generous, like the sheep sharing her wool.”
“What does it mean to be generous?” I ask.
“It means being kind and nice to people and showing you love them,” Franny says immediately, listing off ideas. “You could pick bouquets for people, you could give people a card, you could be nice to them, not littering, not being mean and being pretty nice, hug them.”
“Yeah!” says Felix.
“Maybe if they have never seen a butterfly, you could show them one,” Franny adds.
“Yeah!” says Felix.
I think it’s good to help the bird.
Felix Riley, 3
Then they remember they recently made their first-ever donation of their own, to a non-profit, public broadcaster in Alberta (CKUA), which announced their donation on-air on the radio during a fundraising drive. They were thrilled. “I made my first donation with money from my piggy bank. I got lots of money from my lemonade stand,” Franny says, adding she’s keen to donate more (lemonade stands are lucrative these days). “I’m going to do a donation to a hospital. To help someone that’s in the hospital for kids. I think it would be generous. You know what I’m going to make a donation for after that? Elephants that are at the vet so that they would get better sooner. One of my other donations is going to be for monkeys so where they live is protected.”
“Me too!” says Felix.
And therein lies the goal of the book.
“What do we do to spark generosity and conversations within families and get young people sort of thinking about ways that they can have active roles in their communities?” Bryce asks. “We need young people to be involved in the work of charities, and we need families to be talking about it, and sort of begin focusing on building those values of kindness and connectedness and empathy that will lead to the generosity that we want to see in the sector.”
I’m going to do a donation to a hospital. To help someone that’s in the hospital for kids.
Franny Riley, 5
The book doesn’t stand in isolation. It also comes with online resources, like a web page called “25 Small Acts of Kindness To Create the Biggest Waves of Change,” aimed at kids and their families. “Choosing kindness – helping, giving, or truly listening – offers a real, evidence-backed way to make life brighter for everyone involved,” it says, offering suggestions from running an errand for a neighbour to picking up litter to sharing home-baked food. The hope is to give kids tangible ideas to help solve problems in their own communities.
“Kids have this way of observing needs around them,” Bryce says. “Hopefully just giving them tools to take those steps [will help them] see the need and then bring this to their parents and be, like, ‘Hey, here’s the thing we can do,’ and maybe they’ll have that influence on parents.”
For a family working to focus on building community, these 25 acts of kindness could serve as something of a challenge for 2026 – and be stepping stones to strengthening community.
For Bryce, even as loneliness and disconnection are huge issues, they don’t mean community is a lost cause. And, she says, the community and generosity in Violet’s Song aren’t gone or limited to just small towns. And in some ways, she says, the COVID-19 pandemic and the amount of time people spent at home, or outside in their neighbourhoods, might be reinforcing the value of community once again. “These pockets exist,” she says, citing her own neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. “I don’t think they exist in the way that maybe they used to, or that we imagine they used to, but I also don’t think it’s as bad as it seems – or at least that it’s not recoverable.”
But, she adds, building and sustaining a caring community is work. “It does take intention, though, and it takes time.”
And that means small steps. “Most of all,” Violet says in the book, “you saw a need and you found a way to help.”
