Irene is a North Shore resident and retiree who has always found time for the causes important to her. Irene has been a volunteer with North Shore Community Resources for over a decade. She chooses to volunteer at NSCR because it helps her feel more connected to the community on the North Shore.
When Irene is in the office, you can usually find her in the Seniors One Stop office answering phone calls and in-person inquiries. She finds quite often that people call because they just want to talk to someone and be listened to. She has noticed that helping seniors fight social isolation has become much more important in the last year especially compared when Irene started. In addition to volunteering at Seniors One Stop, you can also find Irene booking appointments for our Income Tax Clinic or conducting volunteer interviews. How Irene summarizes what she does at NSCR is that she tries to help people.
What keeps Irene volunteering at NSCR is the staff. During her time here, she has never seen staff approach volunteers, clients, or colleagues with anything but compassion and kindness. She appreciates the organizational culture and loves seeing how it continues to evolve and improve as the organization grows.
Irene wants those considering volunteering at NSCR to understand how fulfilling it is and how great the staff here are. Over the years she has seen how the staff at NSCR are here to help and improve the lives of others. Irene appreciates how there’s never any judgement from staff about who uses our services. Irene also notes how much NSCR offers so much for the community whether it is the volunteer directory for youth or the welcome packages for newcomers in different languages such as Chinese, Farsi, English, or Korean.
What has surprised Irene about volunteering at NSCR is how much of a need there is in the community. She acknowledges that the North Shore is usually thought of as a more affluent area of the Lower Mainland but through volunteering here Irene has seen firsthand how much demand there is for NSCR’s poverty reduction services.