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In our part of the country, we have just come out of an arctic chill, a whack of snow and what has felt like months of grey cloudy skies. The sun and blue sky have reappeared and thus it is feeling more like a time to set new goals and intentions than that post-holiday haze. If becoming more engaged in your community or meeting new people or trying out something new is on your list for 2024 then we would invite you to have a peruse here on VolunteerConnector. With a couple things to keep in mind…

Volunteering is all on your own terms. You get to decide when, where, what and for how long! It can sometimes feel like you need to commit to something for a lifetime and let this be your permission to commit for a reason or season! Volunteering for a reason can be wanting to practice a specific skill, meet some new people, deepen relationships, share a skill set that you have or feel good about the energy you are putting out. A season of volunteering is acknowledging the realities of ebb and flow in everyone’s life. It might be you have one free weekend in the next 6 months or that summer is a time where you have less on your job plate, so you have more capacity. All the choices are ok! Depending on where life is for you engaging with an organization might not be for you this year, that is ok too. You can still get all the wonderful brain chemicals from volunteering by being mindful of your community. Pick up an extra loaf of bread and drop it off in your community pantry, take someone else’s kids for an hour, shovel a neighbour’s walk, check in on someone you love, take notice of something that would make your community better and do it! 

In the past 30 days the conversation around corporate volunteer groups has come up a lot. It is this season that puts a magnifying glass on what can be a tough experience for both organizations and the humans inside a company, all to the tune of a lovely holiday jingle. 

Volunteering should always feel meaningful for both parties. Volunteer Canada has put together this helpful resource for organizations and corporations in thinking about engaging in a mutually beneficial relationship. Volunteer Canada (2023, November 14). Different Ways to Engage with Your Local Business Community [PowerPoint Slides]. Centerville Network Forum – November 2023, Volunteer Canada.

If you are looking to work with an organization in your area, have a look on VolunteerConnector and start next year off with a conversation. 

Happy 2024! We made it! From us to you, we wish you all the best in the coming year. We wanted to kick our year off here at VolunteerConnector with a note to the humans who serve in government. This blog was inspired by the awesome team at Volunteer Ottawa. You can check their posts here.

So yes, the first blog of 2024 goes out the people who make up the 338 Members of Parliament, the 751 people serving as elected officials in provincial and territorial legislatures and the thousands more who hold positions of mayor, councillors in municipalities and regions across the country. Thanks for your service and energy as you look forward to the next year, we have some thoughts;

Volunteerism contributes to thriving communities and creating places where people feel like they belong. Not going to say that is priceless but it is certainly worth far more than 56 billion dollars, not that our brains can even understand that number. Think about all the interactions everyone in your community has every day with space and places that would not exist without volunteers.

Connect with the societies, non-profits, charities and grassroots humans in your areas. Learn about them, provide connection, funding and most importantly gratitude for their vital work. 

Use your platform to talk about volunteering, civic engagement, mutual aid. It all matters, it all counts. 

Make it easy for people to find volunteer opportunities in your area. That can be a link to your local volunteer centre/capacity builder, your own featured suggestion list or of course VolunteerConnector. 

Have questions? Want to talk more? We are happy to help. 

We want to take the time and space to profoundly thank those volunteers who do not take a break over this time. So much continues to happen in our communities and it is all thanks to people who give their time and energy. The people who keep on making and delivering meals, taking people to appointments, shovelling sidewalks, coaching kids in sports, checking on the food cupboards, participating on boards, responding to emergencies, visiting people who need it. There are seriously to many things to list. So if this is you -Thank you. You make our communities great places to live and exist in. You make sure that people feel seen no matter what time of year and what else is going in the world. 

This week’s guest blog is from Wati Z

“Sometimes, you just need to ask, and let's see from there what door you might open.” This is a direct quote from one of My friends who is probably a champion of volunteer work, she would help with a lot of School volunteering work such as fundraising committees of any kind; she is an active member of the PTA; she does a lot of carpooling driving for struggling parents. So, when she comes to me and asks me to help, I try my best not to disappoint her in any way possible. 

That is when the cupcakes challenge came to me and several more challenges such as sending to school foods from the country of origin for International Day or helping in the afternoon fun for kids where the school rents a lot of kids’ games from bouncy castle, basketball hoop, and many more games just after Covid 19 ease off. This time she is fundraising money to buy children's books. The destination will be decided by grades five and six during their library reading time and the theme is “International World Literacy.” 

This cupcake volunteering to provide ten yummy cupcakes was a fun challenge for me because instead of ten I challenged myself to make 100 cupcakes for a good cause. I love to cook in general and sometimes, I would invite many friends over to my house to have lunch together, so that was why they know that I do have a good recipe for cupcakes. I made all 100 cupcakes that evening before, and on the following day, I had to deliver them to school at 11 a.m., I prepared all the boxes and iced them one by one. As I never made that many cupcakes, it took longer to ice them than it should. 

I remember, those cupcakes were all gone less than 15 minutes started from the recess bell rang. Big and small kids bought almost all those treats from cupcakes, cookies, cakes, popcorn, veggies cut, and so on. Kids are so open to the idea of giving and lending a helping hand to others. 

As I challenged myself, I believe those kids also do the very same things. Eager to contribute and to help. This simple act rewards you with satisfaction and truly makes you feel good to give. 

We love sharing resources and activities that are interesting and helpful to humans engaged in their communities. We have come across a couple in the past month that have shifted our thinking. 

Selkirk College, Capilano University and Vancouver Community College have come together with several community organization in British Columbia to produce Courageous Dialogues: Navigating Polarization. This guide offers a plethora (we do not use that word lightly) of resources for the individual, community and leader to navigate this complex social issue. We love that they have included a lens of time investment to let the reader opt in based on their time so check this out if you are ready for a toe dip or a deep dive. 

We love this work so much we have included it permanently on our Get Support and Learn page. but it is certainly worth sharing here again. Ontario Nonprofit Network have been doing a ton of work around decent work. There are checklists, case studies, publications, reports and toolkits. They take a brilliant intersectional lens. Decent Work is…Needed. Not Difficult. Happening.

Volunteer Alberta is running a webinar on as part of their Equity and Inclusion in Volunteer Screening Series. On January 16, 2024 you can join Yvonne Chenier from IntegralOrg on learning about the protective legislation that protects volunteers. 

Our Next. Symposium group gathered again to further process and reflect on their learnings from the event! Here are some of their key takeaways:

• when the world feels heavy know that there are little bits of kindness happening everywhere
• Gen Z should take over the world immediately
• the charitable sector is made up of human beings and these humans need space in their jobs to FEEL and not just work
• we are in a time and place where radical change is needed
• sometimes the best way to start a tough conversation with a volunteer is to say “sounds like you are not having a good time?”

We held a symposium, and it was fantastic. A huge thank you to all the speakers! They were all truly brilliant and inspired in so many ways. Something is so magical about gathering people in community from across the country (and Scotland). If you have a chance to connect with any of these people or hear any of them speak, please do! Make sure to check out all the awesome work they are doing. Deepest gratitude to all of these humans:

Danielle (Volunteer Connections) 

Debbie (Volunteer Scotland)

Candice (Ontario Non-Profit Network)

April (Helping Hands Cochrane)

Alina (Vantage Point)

Katie (Community Foundation of Nova Scotia)

Aditi (Pillar Non-Profit Network)

Corrina (Volunteer Connect York Region)

Turlough (Winspear Centre) 

 The ideas were so fast and furious! If you missed us and you want to engage in conversation, we are gathering again on November 8 at 11:00 MST. Email us for the invite! 

One of our favourite topics is volunteer recognition. How to make sure the humans who are giving one of the most valuable resources (time) feel seen and valued? There are lots of great stories out there. So many organizations that have found a way of acknowledging the people aligned with their causes in a way that matters! Since it is the season for Fall Fairs, it seems apt to share one such example. For those unfamiliar Agricultural Fairs, they take an enormous amount of work, from the exhibitors to the entries to all the 4-H kids and their animals. It is the sort of the event that the planning for the next one starts the week after this year’s event ends. There are a lot of people who make these events happen and not just on the 2-4 days of the event itself, there is set up and takedown. The end tends to be especially onerous as everyone is fatigued from the weeks leading up. So how does one ensure that you have enough helpful hands show up at the end? You offer for lunch a collection of the prize-winning pies of course. There is something deeper than a pie dish at work in this approach that should be acknowledged. It is giving people the chance to gather and spend time in community with each other. It provides the opportunity for connection that so many people are seeking. If you want to chat more about honouring the time that people give to a cause send us an email. 

This picture is from my local pharmacy and believe it or not when I saw it, I immediately thought of volunteer engagement. This is going to be a roundabout tale, hold on! This spot is in an odd place, there is not a clear way to get there if you are walking. The parking lot is often jammed and so people park across the street and walk over. It is a confusing intersection not far up from a stoplight and the people travelling left actually have the right of way, plus there is a grocery store, daycare and a church. Mad times in urban planning! My takeaway from this image is that someone made a choice, acknowledged how people moved through this space and went with it, in fact made it easier for everyone to get where they wanted to go. They did not hold onto the idea that there is a sidewalk close by, they did not plant bigger shrubbery or something with thorns to try and deter people. So now you know the lay the of the land, what could this possibly have to do with volunteer engagement? It is about acknowledging the truth. 

 Sometimes we hear from people that they are having trouble recruiting volunteers, that they have had these roles for the past 15-20 years and they can’t seem to find any person interested in them now. That is a tough situation to be in for sure, but there is a choice. As an organization you can continue to struggle and suffer, you can try to force people through the thorny, tall shrubbery as it were, or you can lay out some patio stones! There is space for reimaging everything, nothing needs to look like it did before. It is hard work for sure and work that takes time but worth doing if you want to continue to engage volunteers in the work that you are doing. If this post is resonating with you and you want to talk it through just give us an email we would love to catch up.