YORKTON - Recently, Yorkton Council heard a report on National Volunteer Week 2025 which is April 27 – May 3.
The week is not a new initiative having been around for nearly 50 years, but it is perhaps a more important one today than when launched all those years ago.
We live in a very different world now.
We are more interconnected than ever, thanks to the Internet and the cellphone – the latter a contraption that has us ever-tethered to everything in our lives. It has become very much our ball and chain dragging on our lives.
No longer do we go home from work, the cellphone keeps us ‘on the job’.
When it buzzes or vibrates we answer and there we are back on the job even if we are at the pool Thursday night, or a hockey game on Saturday.
The Internet, while not so much a chain on our lives, is certainly a time-consuming maze we are often drawn in to lose hours in the pursuit of the minutiae of life. In the process we often stumble into energy-draining discussions, or information that leaves us feeling lost.
When you consider the impact of technology, factor in now by many to have a second job, and then realize our fixed costs – taxes and such – have tightened budgets, you find our free time and the affordability to do things in that more limited time has been squeezed.
That means many find the time and energy and yes even the affordability to volunteer pushed out of their life equations.
While that is understandable, it is also distressing, because so much of what is good and enjoyable within a community like Yorkton relies on the efforts of volunteers.
Organized sports, as an example, disappear without volunteers stepping up to organize tournaments, coach teams, sell 50/50 tickets and a myriad of other little jobs that must be done so the players can play.
And it is the same story regarding the reliance on volunteers of youth groups, and service clubs, and the film festival and Chamber of Commerce and chess clubs and well, most things we do to relax once we do untether from our cellphones.
It makes this year’s Volunteer Week theme ‘Volunteers Make Waves’ a very appropriate one because the efforts of community volunteers most certainly ripple as a wave through the lives of so many.
“It highlights the power, impact and importance of individual and collective volunteer efforts across Canada. Volunteering builds momentum similar to a wave. Just like water, which is always moving and changing, every volunteer’s effort adds to community impact. Each contribution, whether large or small, contributes to a wave of positive change,” read Taylor Morrison, Director of Recreation & Community Services with the city, as he presented on behalf of Lisa Washington, Manager of Community, Culture and Heritage at the aforementioned Council meeting.
“. . . During National Volunteer Week 2025, we come together to recognize and celebrate all the ways volunteers make waves from coast to coast to coast. Together we create ripples of change. And through the power of our amplified impact, Volunteers Make Waves.”
National Volunteer Week provides an opportunity to recognize volunteers and their positive contributions to society, and they are most-certainly deserving of that recognition in our community.
