Nearly 800 people attended the annual Friends 4 Kindness UnBirthday Party at Mohawk Park in Brantford on Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Nicole Callander, founder and president of Friends 4 Kindness, first started the event back in 2018 when her daughter Kaitlin Coghlin was about to turn 18, and what began as a way to cheer up her child, quickly snowballed into something bigger.
Coughlin has Williams Syndrome, and at the time, the Grade 12 student was feeling upset that she wasn’t getting to experience the same milestones that other kids her age were.
“When you’re an individual with disabilities, you stay in school until you’re 21, and so, we have a daughter that’s a year older than Kaitlin, and the year before, she was seeing her sister experiencing all those big moments you get in Grade 12; things like graduation, prom, and university acceptance letters, but she wasn’t getting any of those milestones and she kept asking, ‘is it because I have no friends?’ I tried to explain to her why but she was still really upset,” recalled Callander. “Her birthday is in July and so that January, I went on social media and asked my family and friends if they could cards between then and her birthday so that when all these milestones were happening, she would get mail and feel the love.”
The mother never expected what would happen next.
“It went viral and we got 6,000 birthday cards from 34 countries, every province, and every state. We actually took a trip to Scotland, and somebody stopped us in the mall because they recognized Kaitlin and even they had sent her a birthday card,” said Callander. “There were just so many cards that we had to start a group called Kindness 4 Kaitlin because people started messaging me asking if we got their gift, so we started making videos of her opening everything. But with that, came hundreds of messages from families saying things like ‘I just sent out 30 birthday invitations, nobody showed up and we’re sitting at the restaurant by ourselves,’ or ‘the whole class went to this party and my kid was the only one who wasn’t invited because of their disability.”
Relating to the struggles that other parents and children were experiencing, the mother wanted to try to find a way to give back.
“For Kaitlin’s 18th birthday that summer, I decided I would rent some pavilions at Mohawk Park and invite that community for an ‘un-birthday’ so that whoever had never been to a birthday party, could be celebrated together,” she said. “Two-hundred people came from as far away as Ottawa and even the United States just so that their child could experience a birthday.”
Callander said that the goal was to really create an inclusive event where everyone was welcome.
“People always say to me, ‘why are kids so mean?’ and personally,I don’t think they’re mean, I think they sometimes avoid people with disabilities because they wonder, ‘how do you talk?’ or ‘how do you eat,’” she said. “So for this party, I really wanted the community to see that our friends can have fun, and it’s not too much work. They might be different, but it’s easy. So now it’s become a thing where we have a big social, and inclusive event, where the community and our friends can come together.”
During the party, parents and their children could pick up an UnBirthday passport and collect stamps for all the stations they visited, and at the end, they got to walk away with a loot bag (500 of which were gone in the first hour-and-a-half) and their selection of prizes.
All around the main Mohawk Park pavilion, there were plenty of activities to enjoy. From the petting zoo to the bouncy castles, the ever-popular train ride, princesses and superheroes, lawn games and bracelet making, bucket drumming and rock decorating, quiet sensory areas and a photo booth with props, there was truly no shortage of fun to be had.
Callander said that none of it would be possible without all of the volunteers and the kind donations.
“There’s only a few of us that puts it all together, and it’s 100 per cent volunteer run. The bigger it gets, the more the community has gotten involved and that just means that our friends mean a lot to them,” she said. “It just goes to show you that people want a place where they truly belong and to see that the community wants to make that happen is really special. I’m just overjoyed to see too, how many people showed up given that it’s a really busy weekend with the Special Olympics going on in Brantford.
Noting that Kaitlin turned 25 on Friday, July 11, Callander said that her daughter has made her a better person, and that she wouldn’t trade her for the world.
“When your child is born and you get the diagnosis, it can be really devastating because it feels like all of the things that you dreamed for your kid have gone out the window; the graduation, the prom, and all of those things that prompted me to start Friends 4 Kindness, but then you see all of this,” she said motioning to the party. “None of this would have happened if I didn’t have a daughter with special needs, right? I would never have recognized any of the silos in our community and the systemic barriers without her. Honestly, I feel like my life is way more fulfilled, and I am way more unconditionally loving than I probably would have been if I didn’t have her. I am truly the best version of myself because of her.”
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
