A woman with roots in Thunder Bay is happy for the local support she’s seen in an online photo contest for the men’s magazine Maxim.
Sherry Navoy left the city 20 years ago and now lives in Calgary.
She’s now competing against 100 other women in the quarter-finals of the Cover Girl competition, which will award the winner $25,000, a spot on the magazine’s cover, a two-page spread, and a trip to the SuperBowl.
Navoy live-streamed the moment she found out she had been voted into the next round of the contest.
“I feel like all these people from Thunder Bay–these individual votes I’ve received from Thunder Bay, from Ontario–I just felt like I needed to bring them on the journey to see what happened, good, bad or whatever,” she explains. “When I won, I felt like we all won.”
She says the news was exciting.
“I was extremely happy. My husband and I, we celebrated, because it kind of just got a little bit further than I thought I would get.”
The former Thunder Bay resident says if she wins, she will use the money for in-vitro fertilization, noting she and her husband have had difficulties having a second child.
She adds there’s a number of criteria the women are judged on, and one of those is the ability to rally people behind a cause.
One of those causes Maxim Magazine supports is Wounded Veterans, which builds homes for wounded vets.
If she can get people behind the cause, she could win.
“People now have gotten to know me, I’m kind of bringing everybody on this journey, that I feel like if I were to say, “Hey, if you can give to a cause.”, they’re more open to trusting, that they won’t feel like they’re just throwing their money away.”
And, Wounded Veterans is a cause she truly cares about.
She’s spending the next few days in Thunder Bay, visiting with her family, and checking out how things have changed in this city, since the days when she delivered newspapers in Westfort as a little girl, and working at the Burger King on Arthur Street.
And, she wants to point out she went through plenty of obstacles in her life to reach this spot, so anyone can reach their goals in the face of adversity.
The next stage of voting is underway and the competition closes November 21st.
