Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today.
Volunteer Canada is the national leader on volunteerism. We are devoted to building the capacity of voluntary organizations, to involving volunteers, and to promoting and fostering volunteerism in all its forms. We have more than 1,000 member organizations across the country, ranging from the very large to small neighbourhood groups that perform vital community services, often with no paid staff whatsoever. Of Canada’s 161,000 charities and non-profits, 54% are run by small staff teams of one or two people or led entirely by volunteers.
Volunteer Canada also has strong connections to the corporate sector. Our Corporate Council on Volunteering has 25 members representing some of Canada’s largest enterprises.
The Canadian community of volunteers is vast and varied. According to the 2007 Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating, there are 12.5 million volunteers in this country contributing 2.1 billion hours of service, the equivalent of 1.1 million full-time jobs.
All this immense civic engagement does not just happen spontaneously. It requires organization, managerial expertise, and highly developed leadership skills to successfully mobilize volunteers. As many of our members say, volunteers do not come free.
Volunteer Canada’s members report that the recession is having a real impact on their work. Our presentation today reflects what we have been hearing from those members. We will summarize what they report to us and what is happening at the grassroots in our community and we will conclude by outlining what they think the federal government could do to make a positive contribution to support their efforts during these challenging times.
Our members tell us that organizations are being forced to lay off staff—often staff responsible for managing volunteers. When that happens, an organization's ability to mobilize the efforts of its volunteers is severely weakened.
The Victorian Order of Nurses tells us that because of staff cuts, some of their offices across the country have had to cut back on a very beneficial program called SMART. SMART stands for seniors maintaining active roles together. It's a program that provides exercise for senior citizens who would otherwise be at risk of becoming weak and socially isolated. This is a largely volunteer-run program, but the volunteers who carry it out must be trained and supervised by paid staff. As VON sites have cut back due to financial resources, they have made difficult choices, one of which has been to reduce the staff who train and supervise the volunteers for SMART.
In Hamilton, Ontario, the volunteer manager at the Brain Injury Services reports that they have had to cut back on their animal therapy program because they lack the resources to pay for training and training materials. This cutback hurts patients who have been benefiting in a very unexpected way. The animal therapy program is highly effective with a certain kind of patient—those who are aggressive or aphasic. These patients respond so well to the presence of gentle pets that they become calm and controlled and are able to receive the speech therapy they need. In this case, there's a sort of cascading effect. A lack of money means an inability to train volunteers for animal therapy, which in turn means that a speech therapist cannot provide a vital service to the patients who desperately need it.
Another challenge affecting volunteer-involving organizations is a generational shift in the world of volunteering. Baby boomers are replacing the older generation of super volunteers who contribute the predominant portion of the hours of volunteering, and baby boomers have different values than their predecessors.
This is how the manager of a large hospital in Burnaby, British Columbia, put it:
We are seeing more baby boomers applying...who have a high level of skills. Identifying and planning for effective ways of utilizing these high skilled volunteers requires very specific skills on the part of Volunteer Resources staff. This is a whole new area of volunteering and it requires organizational development, education, and planning.
There are many ways the federal government can help the volunteer sector to continue serving Canadians. Social investments can stimulate the economy just as much as investments in road construction and bridge building.
We have one specific fiscal recommendation for you. We suggest that the government should consider a targeted investment in a Canadian volunteer support system for communities across the country. The government should invest $5 million a year in a cost-effective, targeted system of training, knowledge sharing, innovation, and basic volunteer management resources for those at the grassroots level who must deal daily with the challenges of finding willing volunteers and assuring that those volunteers are effective in providing vital services.
An important part of the role of the support system will be to identify and reach out to organizations in need at the community level in a proactive way and provide training and resources appropriate to their needs. At a broad national level, we believe such a support system should support a national goal of increasing the rate of volunteering in Canada from the current 46% to 60% over a four-year period.
The government projected in last year's budget that program spending for fiscal 2009-10 would be nearly $225 billion. An annual $5 million investment in volunteering is a tiny fraction of that amount. In fact, it's about 40¢ for every volunteer in the country or 15¢ for every Canadian who benefits from volunteering—a small investment with enormous results.
Thank you.