Volunteers are the muscle of social change in the West Island

Reading over Alena Ziuleva’s recent report on social conditions in the towns built along the shores of Lake St- Louis ( Portrait of the Population of the Southern West Island), one wonders whether this new initiative with its ambitious concerns and its offer of coordination will have much effect. Will this Table de Quartier Sud de l’Ouest-de- l’Île become an effective lobbying body for the West Island, an agent for progressive change? Or just another fading part of the dream of social justice?

This round table is a Centraide initiative and, of course, there’s never any harm in persuading those centralized Montreal organizations to fund our peripheral initiatives. You have to go knocking where the treasure is kept.

According to its website, Centraide supports 30 of these neighbourhood round tables. This regional support is backed up with small budgets, and Ziuleva works, appropriately, out of the old railway station in Beaurepaire, which is also the headquarters of the West Island Community Resource Centre.

There’s a nice irony in recycling an old railway station into a volunteer headquarters. Help is always on the track.

My question though: Is an unofficial, unelected “community council” going to become a player in the West Island?

Once you have the portrait and realize that 75 per cent of West Islanders are bilingual, that we have our fair share of single- parent families, average poverty with all its social effects, poor social housing ( nobody wants to build or live near it), inadequate public transportation, what’s to be done about it? Who has the budgets to deal with all the issues that arise from the portrait? If you can’t buy people to organize change, can it happen?

The round table doesn’t lack ambition. It aims to improve “living conditions and the quality of life for local residents by addressing issues, such as health, education, urban planning, the environment, safety and social and community life.” These concerns are all within municipal and provincial jurisdictions and very large- ticket items. ( Health and education use up most of the provincial budget.)

Could the round table, for example, get fair funding for the Lakeshore General Hospital? How would its recommendations have any impact on the decisions made by urban planning committees in our towns? It’s easy to identify the problems, but can we solve them?

Of course. If all the volunteers who showed up recently in Dorval for the launching of the Portrait let themselves be discouraged by something as mundane as money or jurisdictional squabbles, there would be no social progress. And there’s no point in leaving all the big social issues to politicians, professional and locals who are all on the treadmill of election cycles. Even effective politicians have to be helped by gangs of volunteers. Volunteers don’t give up: volunteers volunteer, get the work done, problem by problem. Or not. They try.

And volunteers are everywhere. They are the muscle of social change. In Amritsar, India, for example, at the site of the Sikh’s Golden Temple, they serve 80,000 free meals a day. And all the work is done by volunteers. They even have volunteers organizing the volunteers. Of course, our volunteers are not in that league ( or religion). I cite the case to demonstrate the global power of volunteerism.

Which brings me to Barry Reynolds, an English professor at John Abbott College, who runs three courses that provide an opportunity for 115 students per semester to volunteer in the West Island. The course was launched with the help and resources of Volunteer West Island ( which happens to be headquartered in the old presbytery in Ste- Annede- Bellevue just down the road from the CEGEP) and, of course, with his college’s warm encouragement. During a five- year- run, the course has had more than 600 students helping non- profit groups. Reynolds began in collaboration with five non- profit groups. There are now 22 accepting John Abbott volunteers.

Apparently this term there are eight students working in the various Lakeshore Nova shops and one young man moving furniture. Four nursing students are driving cancer patients to chemo and other treatments downtown in what is a new activity this term. The pilot project with JAC students complements and expands NOVA’s existing and much- appreciated Patient Driving Program, staffed by 53 dedicated adult volunteer drivers. I remember Ste- Anne municipal council supporting this service even back in the 1980s.

Ziuleva’s Portrait of the Population of the Southern West Island is now an invaluable tool for our West Island army of volunteers. Information empowers. With the portrait in hand, if you didn’t know before what kind of community you were volunteering for, well now you do.