Notes From My Easel

Volunteers

I remember reading in a magazine a couple of years ago, an article written by a professor at one of the Universities out west.  In that article she stated that Hamilton had the largest amount of volunteers per capita anywhere in Canada. I’m a big fan of volunteers.  I believe that their altruistic services could be utilized by cities the same way that non-profit organizations and hospitals rely on them to help defray their own costs.  Why not take some of these terrific people who are willing to give freely of their time to help others, and form a group of people who are vigilant in our parks, malls, recreational areas, festivals and wherever else they can be of service.  I’m talking about this on a large scale. 

Many people who volunteer their time tend to be retired from their jobs.  This means that they are from a wide spectrum of occupations; teachers and professors, doctors and nurses, engineers, clerks, secretaries, factory workers.  The list is endless, and so is the microcosm of their knowledge.  This could make a landmark test project for saving a city a lot of money by putting this vast array of knowledge to work in different areas of the city, such as parks and recreation to start with. 

Let’s say a lot of people sign up to volunteer for tourist sites in the city (by fact and statistic there are more volunteers than are currently needed with waiting lists at some venues) and lets say that many of them happen to enjoy walking outside.  Volunteers could be organized into small groups of two or preferably three.  Making sure that there is always at least one cellphone in the group, give them official, city-volunteer, clip-on badges that are easily identifiable by logo and color.  It would be possible to have these vigilant volunteers in most of the parks during the daylight hours.  Not only would these adults be a detriment to would-be graffiti artists and vandals, but they would also be people that someone could go to for help in an emergency as they would always have a cell phone on them.  These volunteers would have speed dial numbers not only for emergency 911, but also the numbers for wildlife rescue, parks and recreation and a special city hall hot line that actually had  a human being on the other end for immediate, but non-emergency notification of any number of issues.  I think that there are probably a lot of these generous people that would also be happy to help in cleaning off the graffiti from our park benches and signs.  There may also be some wonderfully insightful ideas that would apply to the human engineering aspect that would make parks more functional during festivals.  And it doesn’t have to stop there.  Malls cannot provide security guards to be in every area, but visible volunteers who had the security office on speed-dial would form an obvious detriment to the gathering of gangs of teens in the malls, to say nothing of how a presence of three adults walking together may help deter bullying in the hallways of schools.  And just think of what these volunteers might do to help draw people back to downtown Hamilton.  Who would not feel safer walking down King Street or through Gore Park, seeing the sight of an official badge on someone.  How welcoming this would seem to someone who was a stranger to Hamilton.  Maybe in the downtown core those particular volunteers could have access to other information for tourists also.  To the downtown core of Hamilton I would also like to see the addition of a free shuttle bus that only ran a circut around the downtown core, from Wellington up King to Bay, over to York, passing Copps, the Library and market, down James to Main and back to Wellington and King via Main to Victoria.  I again would not forsee any problems on this free, express Shuttle Bus if there were city volunteers always aboard.  The possibilities are all there.  Imagine Hamilton being known as ‘The Safe City’.