Katie W. Robinette presents “Meeting Needs: The Organization's and the Volunteer's” at the 2016 VECTor Conference on March 9, 2016. Register now to choose her workshop, and check out some great tips below!

 We could not do this without you.

That may be an overused phrase at Healthy Minds Canada, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true. I’ll be presenting at Volunteer Toronto’s 2016 Vector Conference on March 9^th where I am looking forward to sharing two examples of just how true that statement is.

In case you haven’t heard of us, Healthy Minds Canada is a national charity in the mental health and addictions space. We fund research, run conferences and workshops, offer printed and online resources, and run a daily blog.    

With a staff of two full-time and one part-time employees, we absolutely have to leverage the enthusiasm, talent, and expertise of volunteers for every single thing we do.

Chelsea Ricchio, our Communications Manager, manages our bloggers (10 volunteers!), our social media volunteers and some event volunteers and I generally manage and oversee the rest. 

To help manage volunteers, I recruit, motivate, and mentor program and project volunteers and if you’re able to come to the Vector Conference, you’ll hear me share just how we make this work for our online Bell Let’s Talk Day awareness campaign and our ACT 4 Me youth initiative.  Our Bell Let’s Talk campaign has both a National Campaign Manager and a National Campaign Co-Chair who themselves manage a team of regional team leaders and our ACT 4 Me program is run by a Program Manager and has two supporting volunteers. 

These people all donate their time, energy, and commitment to both Healthy Minds Canada and mental health in general to make a difference.  And it’s my job to ensure that they fully appreciate the enormous impact they have on both our organization and the mental health community as a whole. 

Recruiting is challenging, interviewing is time consuming, managing volunteers can sometimes take more of an effort than doing the work myself.  But the rewards, the added reach, the different perspectives, and awesome energy volunteers bring to HMC are so rewarding that days and weeks just fly by.  And it’s way more fun celebrating a successful initiative with people than all alone.   

At VECTor 2016 I’m not only looking forward to sharing what I’ve learned and how we pull these two programs off, but to learn from others so that I can keep improving, keep building, and keep motivating. Hope to see you there!