Minto council members prepared and served a meal for a roomful of local volunteers at the town’s annual volunteer appreciation dinner on April 18.
About 220 volunteers packed the Palmerston Community Centre auditorium for the event, which has become a local Volunteer Week tradition.
With the town recently receiving a gold level provincial designation as a Youth Friendly Community, there was a definite emphasis on young volunteers at the event.
Guest speaker Jason Cranny, a provincial facilitator and curriculum writer for Parks and Recreation Ontario, the Youth Advocacy Training Institute and Stand Up For Change, asked those under 20 to stand up and be recognized with a round of applause from their fellow volunteers.
“It is so empowering to see young people giving back to their community,” said Cranny.
“We need to fill up this room with more young people and to do that what we need to do is work together collaboratively.
“All of us have to dig a little deeper and work a little harder to engage young people.”
Cranny, who has helped other designated youth friendly communities build coalitions around local youth, congratulated Minto on attaining the designation.
“These aren’t given out easily,” he noted.
Cranny said adults often believe youth don’t want to volunteer, or are too busy to get involved. To engage them, he said, requires thinking outside the box.
“Youth are an untapped resource in any community … Sometimes we have to step out of our comfort zone,” he said.
Cranny relayed his experience with youth volunteers from a high school in one community.
“I was working with youth that were like me,” he said. “They were part of student council. They were active. They were part of Sports teams. So it was fun for me; I knew what I was going to get out of it and I knew that they were going to be articulate and they were going to give amazing stuff back.”
To find more volunteers, however, he decided he needed to reach out to another crowd of young people, the group hanging around outside smoking cigarettes.
“The youth in this case were in a spot that I never really wanted to go. I wasn’t a smoker, but I said, here’s this group of young people that I had to engage and I didn’t know how to go about it,” Cranny stated.
However, he continued, “That smoking group ended up being some of the most wonderful volunteers I have ever had the privilege of working with. I’m telling you, the amount of work, time and energy that these individuals put into the volunteer work that they did with me was extraordinary.”
Cranny noted sharing the volunteer experience with youth who aren’t usually the first to join in can be particularly rewarding for them and the community.
“When you start working with young people who have never been tapped to be a leader … who’ve never been approached to come out and volunteer and they actually come out and do so and then they get rewarded with a meal like this or a thank you or a pat on the back – think about how that must make a young person feel, especially when they’ve never had it before.”
While Cranny said he feels many communities don’t identify young people as a priority, he notes that Minto, along with neighbouring communities like Mapleton and Wellington North, as well as some in nearby Grey and Bruce counties, are starting to do so.
“These other communities are also recognizing the power and the importance of young people,” he said.
“So Minto has not only decided they are putting in some resources and people power and some financial clout, but they’re also educating themselves.”
Cranny said becoming educated is the key to successfully reaching out to young people.
“You need to educate the general populace, the people on council, the people who see and work with young people on a regular basis but maybe don’t engage with them,” he suggested.
Mayor George Bridge said it’s important for communities to invest in their youth.
“We have to find that little bit of money that we need, but it comes back tenfold,” said Bridge.
Minto economic development assistant Taylor Kuenen, who works with the Minto Youth Action Council (MYAC), cited the “amazing” young people who are part of the group and urged others to join in.
“All you other youth who aren’t involved, get involved. It’s so much fun what they’re doing,” she said.
