The Community Spirit Group Volunteer Award recognizes a group of three or more individuals who have come together to volunteer their time towards a shared goal/activity or event involving leadership, innovation and creativity. Activities or events can benefit all ages.
Distress Centre Halton Volunteer Trainers & The Innovators Council are the Community Spirit Group Volunteer Award recipients sponsored by First Ontario Credit Union.
Distress Centre Halton Volunteer Trainers
For 47 years, DCH has provided free and confidential telephone support to people in our community to better cope with crisis, loneliness, and emotional stress. The training focuses on active listening, befriending, suicide risk assessment, and community referrals. Trainers prepare volunteers to take calls on our Distress Line, make outbound reassurance calls with our TeleCheck service, and respond to calls on our national suicide prevention line with Crisis Services Canada. Since April 2020, our volunteers have responded to 33,621 calls with people in distress or crisis.
The Training Team showed true community spirit when in March 2020, they quickly went remote to ensure services remained available to the public. Trainers skillfully adapted in-person classes to go online within weeks and faced an overwhelming number of applications – a 92% increase from 2019. This required larger class sizes and three additional training sessions within four months, graduating 150 new volunteers in 2020. When the world had to step back, trainers stepped up!
Their teamwork, leadership, and countless volunteer hours during a pandemic have genuinely made a difference to the mental wellness of our community. They have also grown empathetic new community citizens by helping launch many volunteers into careers in mental health, policing, and other community professions.
Town of Oakville
Jason Bengert and Johanne Barbieri
First Ontario Credit Union representative Jason Bengert with Johanne Barbieri on behalf of the Innovators Council
The Innovators Council
Lesley Dagenais, Vanessa Lynch, Le-Anh Yuan, Johanne Barbieri, and Morgan Dunnigan - came together to create The Innovators to support the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital (OTMH).
Since its inception, these Council members have spent countless hours planning various Innovators events for the Oakville Hospital Foundation, engaging their networks to join The Innovators and raising funds to support OTMH.
The vision of The Innovators is to engage like-minded young professionals in philanthropy while providing enriched networking opportunities within the hospital and our community.
The Innovators attended educational events throughout the year, developing an understanding of the community health care needs and innovative treatments from OTMH medical experts.
The Council demonstrated a commitment to support the community's well-being by founding this unique volunteer group to foster philanthropy and help ensure that patients and their loved ones can continue to receive world-class community health care right here at home.
