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Revamping the volunteer experience in the face of a pandemic

Published: November 15, 2021

Manitoba’s South Central Eco Institute, other nonprofits benefit from RW Institute’s remote volunteering ‘accelerator’

Manitoba’s South Central Eco Institute, other nonprofits benefit from RW Institute’s remote volunteering ‘accelerator’

As a watershed care program, Riverwatch has always been a hands-on, feet-wet proposition.

That all changed, as so much else did, with the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020.

“Regrettably, the global pandemic virtually brought class visits and field trips to an end. We had a tough year in the education and outreach business last year,” says Kent Lewarne, project manager with the South Central Eco Institute, a Manitoba-based watershed management program managed by Prairie Spirit School Division.

The SCEI’s Riverwatch program, established in 2011 and supported financially by Enbridge, has traditionally seen Grade 5 through 12 students from as many as 40 Manitoba schools collect, analyze and report water samples from various points in the Lake Winnipeg watershed, with data published on the SCEI website.

“While we were able to connect to a few sites and did a few visits virtually, the hands-on component of Riverwatch made it exceedingly hard to provide a complete experience,” remarks Lewarne.

In the face of the coronavirus, the RW Institute in 2020 established the Virtual Volunteering Accelerator program. The two-week intensive course is designed for nonprofit and community organizations looking to increase their competency and capacity to facilitate remote volunteering. While the pandemic is abating in some regions, many North Americans are still working at home—and the VVA program helps nonprofits develop the tools and knowledge to deliver great volunteer experiences.

Enbridge has made a point of supporting COVID-challenged communities in turbulent times. Since spring 2020, we’ve worked closely with our nonprofit community partners, our closest Indigenous and Tribal neighbors, and local governments to identify where resources have been needed most and provide relief to the most vulnerable among us.

As a supplementary initiative, Enbridge sponsored VVA participation for 13 of our community partners in 2021, and plans on sponsoring seven more partners in 2022. This year, those Enbridge-sponsored partners included:

Lewarne and the SCEI made good use of the RW Institute’s VVA “boot camp,” embarking on an upgrade project for the organization’s website. As it turned out, the SCEI was able to secure the volunteer services of three Enbridge employees with geographic information system (GIS) experience for this data-driven initiative.

“Before long, we had three amazing volunteers who’ve successfully found a way to incorporate our historic data into new and improved data collection surveys—and now we’re working on new dashboards to communicate the data,” says Lewarne.

“My colleague from the Pembina Valley Watershed District was able to join (the VVA course) as well,” he says. “It was an honor for us to be asked to participate in the Accelerator program. I enjoyed it immensely.”

(TOP PHOTO: Three Manitoba students, shown here collecting and analyzing water samples for the SCEI’s Riverwatch program, went on to share their findings as a “citizen science” presentation before an international audience of 24 countries at the Japan Super Science Fair. “They were an amazing group and did an exceptional job sharing Riverwatch,” says Lewarne.)

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