Creating meaningful opportunities

I’m writing this article from a hotel room in Ottawa. I had the privilege today of accepting a national award from Volunteer Canada on behalf of our volunteer team. Our team won the Social Innovator for the Prairies award, which came with a daylong session reviewing best practices from all of the other national award winners. The event closed with the presentation of our award by the Minister of Jobs and Families, Patty Hajdu. Hearing how other voluntary organization leaders and volunteers from across the country had won their awards was inspiring, at the very least.

Over the last number of years, the number of volunteers Unison deploys across southern Alberta has continually grown. The growth in our food security programs, food bank, and Meals on Wheels has necessitated additional volunteers and hours. We also added a largely volunteer-run transportation program to assist seniors in getting to important medical or legal appointments.
We’ve started to view our volunteer programs and roles in a fairly different way now. When we design a volunteer position, we design it not only with the notion of who the volunteer is helping, but what impact the role has on the volunteer themselves.

Early in the pandemic, during one of the re-openings, we decided to operate a community kitchen with the support of a grant. At that time, we didn’t have a food bank. We were running free bread markets and giving away donated bread. The number of seniors who were food insecure surprised us, and we designed the program to support a small group of seniors who were very low on the income scale. Our chef would train participants to make nutritious, low-cost meals for one. Part of the arrangement was that for every meal a participant made to take home, they were required to make another meal for a senior who was mobility-challenged and of lower socioeconomic status.

Later, some of our staff overheard participants telling other members at Unison at Kerby Centre that they were Unison volunteers.

We had not thought of these participants as volunteers. They were recipients of the program. But you could overhear them, with pride, describing how they were making frozen meals for seniors who were shut in. That moment made us realize that our volunteer roles were much more impactful than we had previously understood. We thought we were running a food security program, and we were. But we were also creating purpose and meaning, and the opportunity to help someone else.

When we designed that program, we had not built in a volunteer component. Operating it taught us a great deal more about volunteer programs than we had known before.

Now, when we design specialized opportunities for volunteers, we keep this in mind, because we understand that we are offering purpose and meaningful opportunities.

These programs contribute a great deal to other seniors, and we recognize the value we are creating for the volunteers themselves. During our best practices session, I shared this story and what we learned from it.

As we look to the future, we know we will need much more volunteer support. But we are also considering programs where seniors and older adults won’t be the recipients. Programs being designed to support low-income families or newcomers to Canada will have seniors not as the people being served, but as the people doing the serving. We have learned that organizing people and creating meaningful opportunities to help others is as valuable as, if not more than, some of the direct services and supports we provide.