Charity in Sudbury, Ont., scales back program due to volunteer shortage

A charity in Sudbury, Ont., has had to scale back its plans due to a shortage of volunteers.

Sudbury Shared Harvest grows and maintains "food forests" across the city. A food forest is an area with perennial plants often fruit trees that grow food.

Carrie Regenstreif, the organization's engagement co-ordinator, says their initial goal was to have a food forest on public property in each of Sudbury's 12 wards. But due to a lack of volunteers, they've stopped at nine for now.

"We'll get 25 or 30 people out for planting day and they sign up and they say they're going to come out and help take care of it in the future," she said.

"And at times, none of those people ever shows up again."

While food forests involve less work to maintain than a traditional vegetable garden, Regenstreif says they still need volunteers to help with work like pruning and weeding.

"They're sort of billed as a low-maintenance garden or sometimes even no maintenance, which I suppose you could do if you were not in a city park and nobody was going to complain about the way it looked," she said.

Recovering from the pandemic

Regenstreif says some of their food forests have a dedicated group of volunteers and community gardeners who help maintain them, but that's not the case for all of them.

She says that anecdotally, it's more difficult to recruit long-term volunteers since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mary Lou Hussak, the executive director of United Way North East Ontario, says the pandemic prevented a lot of people from volunteering for non-profit organizations.

"People couldn't go out, they couldn't do the duties that they normally did, and they couldn't support people in the same way," she said. "A lot of volunteering is in person."

United Way North East Ontario supports social service programs in Sudbury, North Bay, Parry Sound, Cochrane, Timmins and Manitoulin.

Hussak says United Way has set up volunteer resource centres across the six districts it represents to match potential volunteers with organizations that fit their interests.

But a lot of organizations still haven't recovered from the pandemic.

"What we find is some of the programs that were delivered with a lot of volunteer support have had to be delivered now by staff members," Hussak said.