Volunteers needed to help digitize Confederation debates
The following are volunteer opportunities in Kitchener-Waterloo. For more information, call the Volunteer Action Centre in Kitchener at 519-742-8610 or check the website at www.volunteerkw.ca.
Celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday by volunteering with The Confederation Debates. We are digitizing Canada’s founding colonial, federal, and indigenous records and will post them to a legacy website. The records are already scanned into searchable text, but we need your help to fix typos, transcribe garbled sections and find interesting passages for us to post on social media. Anyone can join — high school students can use the work to complete their volunteer hours. No history knowledge is necessary and there are no minimum time requirements. To join Canadians from across the country who are reading these 100-plus-year-old records from every province, go to theconfederationdebates.ca, watch the short how-to training video, and begin reading Canada’s founding debates; for more information, contact Dan at dheidt@uwaterloo.ca.
Join the City of Waterloo Street Team of volunteers and city staff who go to different events, activities and community spaces across the city to talk to community members about their neighbourhood. Survey information collected will help create the neighbourhood strategy. Shifts are approximately two hours, typically evenings or weekends. There will be 30 to 40 shift opportunities to choose from between May and August 2017. Apply by following this link: http://bttr.im/i1110 or contact volunteer@waterloo.ca or 519-888-6488 for application details.
Get involved with Focus on Nature and give schoolchildren with a fun day outdoors, exploring the beautiful parks and trails in the Waterloo Region. As a volunteer program assistant, you will be part of a team inspiring elementary school students to open their eyes to the wonders of nature, using simple point-and-shoot cameras. It’s a fun day for all and you can pick the workshop dates that you wish to sign up for. You don’t have to be a photographer to be a Focus on Nature volunteer, but an interest in the arts and the great outdoors would be assets in mentoring the students. Visit focusonnature.ca and start helping our kids connect with nature through photography. To find a volunteer opportunity that suits you, search United Way’s online volunteer opportunities database at www.uwcambridge.on.ca and click on the Volunteer Centre tab, or call 519-621-1030.
Focus on Volunteering: May 2017 — United Way Youth Ambassador Club: True leaders in our community
The United Way Youth Ambassador Club encourages young people to put their leadership skills to work for their local community.
High school students in Cambridge are welcome to join at any time to learn about how they can make a difference on community issues and also earn volunteer hours by participating in micro-volunteerism projects.
The Youth Ambassador Club is made up of eight students from schools across Cambridge. Sisters Rawan, Rahaf, and Ranim from Preston High School say they joined the club “because we are given a chance to work with like-minded youth to improve our community. In the club we are also exposed to issues in the community that are overlooked and we can try to create solutions to these problems. Volunteering is great because it allows us to meet new people and do something that we are passionate about.”
The club meets every two weeks and each meeting is filled with event and project brainstorming, along with a variety of community updates. Most recently, the Youth Ambassador Club is working on collecting items for hygiene hampers they hope to distribute to newcomer families. As student and community leaders, they are in charge of sharing project information and organizing collection drives in their school and classes. The Youth Ambassador Club is also promoting community involvement to their peers and classmates by sharing information on social media and in their homeroom classes. Most of the students in the Youth Ambassador Club volunteer elsewhere in the community, which goes to show that these students are true leaders in the Cambridge community.