Our volunteers are our heroes

Volunteering is an integral part of Canadian culture. Approximately 41 per cent of all Canadians formally volunteer their time with one organization or another. The total could be as high as 86 per cent, as people volunteer informally without belonging to one organization but spread their time and talents around to a variety of them.

It was previously assumed that of the 41 per cent, about 99 per cent were retirees over the age of 60 or 65, but things are changing. Trends are evolving alongside changing priorities and lifestyles, with youth and young adults now being the majority of volunteers in many capacities, the most popular being volunteering with animals, community projects, sports, hospitals and “green” projects.

It is a trend we have noticed at the Mission to Seafarers. Anyone with teenagers knows that students are required to have logged volunteer hours before they can graduate – a huge and important step forward from when my generation were teenagers. And do they ever take this seriously! The volunteers we have had at our mission stations are engaged. They want to know what seafarers do, they show up on time and stay late. They participate and encourage their friends to help as well. Youth and young adults want to volunteer with an organization that will challenge them, and the mission has provided those challenges.

At one small southern Ontario university, volunteering with an international mission such as ours is a course requirement. This means six months as a volunteer and a written paper on the specific area the volunteer worked in, and lessons learned. The first year of this course requirement was so successful that the university added it as a work/learning component for all of its international studies programs. (This is not a seminary. We can’t seem to get volunteers from seminaries for some reason.)

Volunteers of all ages are the backbone of most charitable organizations, and the Mission to Seafarers is no different. COVID-19 ended the participation of a lot of seniors for obvious reasons – not always the fear of disease, but the fear of the unknown. Only three senior volunteers who were with us prior to the pandemic have remained. It’s been a rough few years, but we are hopeful that as a younger, more resilient and more adventurous group of volunteers has been finding its way to the mission, our volunteer bank will grow once again.

But as I write, this is the time of year when the volunteers come forward after working at home for months: the knitting and sewing volunteers. As I write, it’s the season of Advent, and we are busy collecting up homemade knitwear and quilts, along with boxes of toothpaste and shampoo, body wash and more, all of which will find their way into our Christmas ditty bags, which we begin giving to seafarers on St. Nicholas Day, Dec. 6. Why this day? Because St. Nicholas is the patron saint of seafarers!

It’s a joy to catch up with all the many people who spend hours of their own time throughout the year making beautiful warm things for people they have never met, and we bless each and every one of them for their work and contributions to the lives of the seafarers we serve. As much as the folks who work in our mission centres, these folks are volunteers for the mission. Everything counts.

Our mission services end when the last ship leaves Lake Ontario before the lake freezes, or at least when the Welland Canal closes for maintenance (this year on Jan. 5). Our services begin again at the end of March when the St. Lawrence thaws and the ships can move freely again between Montreal and Thunder Bay on “Highway H20.” During this hiatus, we spend time in training courses, preparing our mission centres for the arrival of the next group of seafarers, and praying that volunteers will answer the call to help us!

If you’re interested in becoming a volunteer with the Mission to Seafarers Southern Ontario and learning how to be a volunteer or ship visitor at our Oshawa mission (the Terry Finlay Seafarers Centre) or as a ship visitor in Toronto, please contact me at [email protected].