National Volunteer Week in Canada - April 14 - 20, 2024
This week is National Volunteer Week in Canada, and Assist wants to thank our volunteers. Like many not-for-profit organizations in Canada, we rely on volunteers for a range of activities, from program delivery (peer support) to fundraising to governance. It is easy to say phrases like “we couldn’t do it without you” but this is not a trite phrase in our world—we really could not do what we do without our incredible team of volunteers.
Assist held its Annual General Meeting this week and we presented our Volunteer of the Year" Award. Our AGM does not always line up with Volunteer Week - which is traditionally the third week of April. We often hold our AGM one week later to ensure that our financial statements are ready, so this April features not only a solar eclipse but also a convergence of presentation of our Volunteer of the Year Award with Volunteer Week!
I want to thank all of our volunteers. We have about 150 peer support program volunteers who bring diversity of experience and perspectives to our program. We trained six new volunteers in Edmonton in 2022 and we trained six new volunteers in Calgary this year. We are looking forward to additional training and refresher sessions in the next year. Our volunteers are kind and caring lawyers—and law doesn’t always allow us to wear our empathy on our sleeves. Whenever I begin to feel cynical about our profession, I think of these amazing lawyers and my cynicism fades.
Our peer support program works because we match volunteers with callers based on the caller’s situation along with other markers of affinity (where appropriate.) Sometimes, a caller would like to speak to someone who practices in their area, but we also have callers who do not want to interact with someone in their field. This is when we are grateful to COVID for making Zoom an essential tool in our toolboxes—we are often able to match a caller with someone who practices in their area but in a different region.
Not only do we have volunteers across Alberta, we also have volunteers in Nunavut since we provide our program to Nunavut lawyers and articling students. While there are some geographic factors affecting how law is practiced, most issues that lawyers face—client demands, long hours, potential burnout, difficult opposing counsel—seem to be universal. This means that even if you are a lawyer or student in Alberta, you could be matched with a lawyer in Nunavut if you are concerned about running into your peer support volunteer locally!
There is no need to worry about running into your peer support volunteer in a social setting, by the way. Lawyers meet each other in all sorts of ways—at CBA events, through friends, on files. If you were to see your peer support volunteer and don’t want to explain how you know each other, you can say something vague like “I think we’ve met before” without saying anything further. Or you can simply say “it’s a pleasure to meet you”—“meeting” someone does not necessarily mean you have never encountered them before!
If you are one of our peer support volunteers and wish you would be called more often, you are not alone. In 2023 (November 1, 2022 through October 31, 2023), we made 65 peer support matches, and we have a pool of 150 volunteers, so not everyone gets called even in a two-year period. It helps us match you if we know as much as possible about your experiences—so please let us know if you would like to have a virtual coffee to make sure know all about the experiences you can share with callers.
But even if we haven’t called you for a little while, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t thinking about you and appreciating the fact that you are on our roster—we are just looking for particular experiences at particular times.
Here is a surprising fact about our peer support program: in 2023, about two-thirds of our callers were female. We see the same trend in our professional psychological counselling services program, and our lead psychologist, Dr. Brian Forbes, explains that women generally access services more readily than men, so this is not unique to our peer support program. And more than three-quarters of volunteers assigned to callers were female—but peer support is not a gendered program, and we will be working on what factors led to more women receiving volunteer matches. I note that many of our male volunteers are senior lawyers—they are wonderful fonts of wisdom, but we get a lot of calls from young lawyers and articling students, and we may be matching them with lawyers with recent experience in the issues students and juniors are facing.
But this raises an important issue about lawyers and retirement. There was an old commercial slogan that said “Old Levis never die—they just fade away.” Now that I am an old lawyer, I can apply this saying to our profession: Old lawyers don’t die either. We prefer to fade away, moving back from practice in increments rather than with a hard stop. According to the Law Society Annual Report, part-time status is popular with relatively junior female lawyers and very senior male lawyers.
All lawyers who are considering retirement can talk with one of our peer support volunteers who is pursuing reduced hours careers or non-traditional roles. Our fully retired volunteers can be great resources for lawyers who want to cut the ties (and there are excellent reasons why lawyers choose to do "line-in-the-sand retirements!") And watch for news about an upcoming screening of the film Retirement on Trial by BC lawyer Stephen Herman and Evelyn Neaman which will be hosted by Assist, the Law Society, CBA-Alberta and ALIA!
Some of our peer support volunteers participate in our Red Mug Coffee Circles, where we deliver peer support in a community structure. Assist has four pillars of programming: Professional Counselling, Peer Support, Education & Awareness, and Community. I always struggle to assign RMCC to a pillar, and it is possible that I am not always consistent!
RMCC is a different type of peer experience. While a matched peer support situation is extremely confidential, relying on lawyers’ Code of Conduct confidentiality provisions, we suggest that Red Mug Coffee Circles are not as suitable for personal types of disclosure because it is a group setting. We tend to talk about career-related issues at Red Mug Coffee Circles, but we remind everyone about confidentiality regularly.
If you haven’t experienced our online community, please join us some Monday at noon—we just talk about a topic, or we may move in a different direction depending on the interests of people who are present. Thank you to our team of volunteers who make Red Mug Coffee Circles such a welcoming and kind community.
Thank you to our incredible team of lawyer yogis and mindfulness leaders - we really appreciate how they share their talents within the legal community.
There is also a wonderful group of lawyers who support our fundraising efforts. Fundraising is an essential part of being a charity since, unfortunately in my experience, money doesn’t grow on trees. When we launch a fundraising campaign, we need the money, but it is also a tangible way of showing that you value our work.
This fall, we will be hosting a Hand-to-Hand gala in Edmonton to raise awareness about mental health and well-being in law. We have a group of Edmonton lawyers working together to ensure that this event is one of the highlights of the year.
And it is a very convenient time for me to thank Assist’s wonderful board who provide guidance and stewardship around the year. We just had our spring board meeting where our directors got to do exciting things like review our financial statements—and like most lawyers, most of them didn’t go into law to do math!
We have been very fortunate to have organizations who support us with in-kind services which help our bottom line. This group includes Icona, our website provider, ToppanMerrill which offers us complimentary printing services from time to time. We received largesse from JSS Barristers in the form of pro bono office space for nine years (!) and from Frontier Solutions. Thank you to our pro bono service provides!
Remember that providing a gift in kind can be a wonderful way of supporting a charity like Assist.
Many lawyers volunteer in a range of capacities. I would like to acknowledge the good work being done by lawyers everywhere through pro bono services and on ad hoc bases, with other worthwhile charities, and through board service. Our profession sometimes gets a bad rap in media where we are seen as money-grubbing and ethic-less hired guns. We know that this is not true—so thank you to everyone who is volunteering. May our collective efforts shift this negative misperception through the good work you are doing.
Organizations like Assist cannot fulfill our mandates without dedicated service by volunteers—you truly make our world go round.
Enough suspense: Assist’s Volunteer of the Year is Tony Bell from the Crown’s office! Tony has handled some incredibly challenging peer support situations in the last year or two. I hesitated to ask him for the third one, but I knew that he had the right experience, demeanor and commitment to make a difficult situation work, and he came through for a very vulnerable caller. Thank you, Tony!
Loraine