A couple of young Okotokians are working hard to give back to the Alberta Children's Hospital.

Paige (12) and Blakely (9), who both attend École Percy Pegler School, are looking to make a sizable donation to the hospital, and they're looking to local businesses to join in.

They've been collecting bottles in order to donate the proceeds to the children's hospital for a few years now.

Paige says both she and Blakely have a connection to the hospital.

"Me and Blakely have both needed the children's hospital before and one day we just decided we wanted to help. We didn't know how we could so we thought about it and we came up with collecting bottles, so we've been doing that for three or four summers."

It's become a tradition for them as well as some of their friends that help out from time to time. 

The pair is pretty well known at this point.

"We mostly just do our loop so that the people whose doors we always knock on, they're like 'you here for bottles?" Because they already know we're collecting bottles," says Paige.

So far they've raised $700.

This year though, they've set a couple of lofty goals.

"This summer we're trying to reach $1000 just for bottles, but then we also have a new goal. We're trying to find 100 businesses to match our $1000 so that we can donate $100,000," explains Blakely.

That latest goal was set soon after they learned that this year marks the hospital's 100th anniversary.

Kelsey Krause, Blakely's mother and Paige's step-mother,

"They're just the most authentic givers out there. They always find these kind of challenges or come up with these ideas."

Bottle drives are a classic method of fundraising for kids, and Kelsey can see why, since the girls instantly took a liking to it.

"They'd collect these bottles and the excitement grew because they'd see how many bottles they were able to collect and we would take them back to the bottle depot once we got a big pile and they'd get a few hundred dollars every time we'd go. To them this is a huge amount of money, right?"

She struggled to put into words how proud she was, not only of the girls' initiative, but of their recognition of everything the children's hospital does.

"The girls see this and I think they truly do understand how grateful they are. They were like 'we're so lucky, when we get sick we just get what we need and we're good. There's probably kids that need different machines, different surgeries, so let's, instead of their parents having to pay for those, let's give money to the children's hospital so that they don't have to pay for them.' That's kind of how they think."

The pair have already enlisted two businesses, Okotoks Ford and Okotoks Sobeys, to match their donation, and they're making plenty of calls to get more.

As for the bottles, anyone wanting to donate some can reach Kelsey at (403) 968-7449 or drop their bottles off at The Eagle 100.9