Written by Rayna Almas
As I sit down and open my computer for the last time before Christmas, I can’t help but smile as I reflect on what this year has brought for us at WRSFG. At the beginning of 2021, we didn’t have any high school volunteers on our team, let alone an incredible blog with almost 100 posts written by youth across southern Ontario.
Up until March 2021, the only volunteers we had ever had were for our garden builds and some garden maintenance at the schools we work with throughout Waterloo Region. You can see more about those school gardens here, if you’d like. It’s our origin story, and a piece of us that we aren’t saying goodbye to!
So how did we get here?
At the beginning of the year, we were wondering how to engage more young people online. We had our Youth Portal, which is awesome (if you ask me), but that was about it. We knew that there were greater opportunities for youth to get involved in what we were beginning to create. The main issue is that we weren’t really sure what we were creating at that point.
The intuitive choice for us was to create volunteer roles specifically for students to gain their volunteer hours, have fun, and do something worthwhile while stuck at home all the time. The first role we fleshed out was this one: the youth-led blog. Shortly after that, we drafted up ideas for social media content creators, Youth Portal consultants, and web developers.
When we began posting these opportunities up, we were blown away by the response! In just over two months, we had over 100 signups and by July, we had over 85 volunteers on our team. With the blog alone, we were working with three dozen high school volunteers in ten cities across southern Ontario by May.
In the months that followed, our program grew, and grew, and grew, until we had to make the choice to begin waitlisting those youth who signed up. We simply didn’t have the capacity to offer meaningful opportunities for them, or to facilitate their learning and success.
Over time, we creatively added roles to our slowly developing program, including editing, publishing, and graphic design positions for the blog. So what you see today is entirely the work of our amazing volunteers, from topic selection all the way to posting.
Where do we grow from here?
Over the past few months, we’ve been working behind the scenes to put together our Youth in Food Systems program, a melding of all of our youth opportunities into one cohesive program working towards a shared goal: to inspire and educate young people about food systems. You see, youth today aren’t engaging with our food systems in the same ways as people used to. This is largely because of the industrialization of our food systems that have steadily widened the gap between producers and consumers over the last few decades.
We are limited in our capacity to bring this program to life at the moment, but are extremely hopeful that we’ll find the means to continue to grow in the ways that we have demonstrated we can. At the foundation of all this is our youth team, as well as all of you who take the time to support us by following on social media, signing up for the newsletter, reading the blog, and generously donating.
This is all to say that 2022 is going to be a fantastic year for us, and we can’t wait for it! For now, though, I have big plans involving Netflix, hot chocolate, and more than a few gingerbread cookies.
Happy holidays, everyone!