From April 19 to 25, communities everywhere will be celebrating National Volunteer Week. It’s a week dedicated to recognising the contributions of the volunteers that make so many community agencies and organizations more successful and valued.

In 2019 WPL had 233 volunteers and, combined, they worked almost 4839 hours. The following volunteers will be receiving Community Builder pins from the City of Waterloo for their volunteer work:

• Karen Smart 15 years
• Peggy Bain 5 years
• Cathy Withers 5 years

Karen, Peggy and Cathy have also been nominated to receive Ontario Service Awards.

From the Volunteer Action Centre

In Waterloo Region 48% of the population over the age of 15 years volunteer, helping make this community a great place to live and work.

In Canada, 12.7 million volunteers contribute their time and abilities to serving our communities.

Teen Events Team

WPL’s Teen Events Team organizes, promotes and runs library events. In 2019 this group was involved with setting up and running a Halloween haunted house, a seed planting station for kids, and a pop up “random acts of kindness” table for library visitors. They helped with family story times, an Engineering Boot Camp, and WPL’s super-popular Summer Reading Club. They most recently helped to sort donations collected for the Waterloo Wayside Centre. The Teen Events Team members are full of energy and fresh ideas to help people come together and have fun!

Collections Department Volunteers

Collections volunteers help us keep our collections in great shape! They help us maintain the new materials shelves as well as our newspaper and magazine collections. They make scratched DVDs functional again, shelf read our collections to ensure proper order and good condition, and they cover new and current books. These volunteers are always willing to take on new projects to best suit our customers. We’re very thankful for the time they commit to our library.

McCormick Branch (MCC) Volunteers

The MCC volunteers do a variety of jobs which include picture book and DVD cleaning, shelf reading and filing of holds. Volunteers also support the English Conversation Circle which helps new immigrant adults learn English. Students from Frontier College donate their time to the Reading Buddies and Number Ninjas programs. These two programs provide children with the opportunity to enhance and build their literacy and number learning abilities.

John M. Harper Branch Volunteers

Volunteers at the Harper Branch can be found helping with a variety of tasks that support daily operations and services. Their tasks include emptying and sorting items returned through the book sorter, filing book reserves, returning movies to the shelves, repairing books that are damaged, buffing scratched audio-visual items and shelf reading collections to ensure proper dewey decimal and alphabetic order.

Visiting Library Service (VLS)

Seniors living independently as well as those residing in retirement and long-term-care residences are all able to enjoy reading and listening to books thanks to the VLS team of volunteers. VLS volunteers select, deliver and return materials on behalf of those that are no longer able to visit the library independently. VLS volunteers are a breath of fresh air, and provide a pleasure and a pastime for many that are struggling with health and age-related issues.

Book Reserves Volunteers

The library’s book reserve volunteers are the ones that help to shelve the books that are available for customers to pick up when their request has been filled. Volunteers are usually found in the book reserves area each afternoon, filing and organizing items so that customers can find their holds quickly and efficiently. Book Reserves Volunteers are very busy, handling hundred of items each and every week.