Volunteer Peterborough aims to buck a national trend of declining volunteerism by supporting people to find opportunities that match their skills and interests.
On a spring day in 2022, Peterborough, Ontario, resident Lois Tuffin watched something unfold in her community that she wasn’t proud of.
The leader of the federal New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh, was in town to campaign for a local candidate in the provincial election. As he left his rally, aggressive protesters verbally harassed the politician with vitriolic language – an experience Singh later described as one of the most troubling in his career, holding it up as an example of deteriorating civility in Canadian political discourse.
The incident shook Tuffin, who is a community champion and long-time volunteer in the small city. But she knew Peterborough was better than what was on display that day. In fact, the following weekend she coordinated a city-wide donation drive for the local food bank that brought in 25,000 pounds of food at a time when many residents were struggling to afford necessities.
How could the same city produce such disparate scenes – one of hate and one of generosity? Tuffin and some fellow volunteers gathered to consider that question and brainstorm how to nudge people toward more positive forms of community engagement. “We figured the best thing we could do would be to create a vortex of good,” she remembers. “We wanted to put a counterbalance out there.”
The Jagmeet Singh incident happened just a few months after the Omicron variant had changed the trajectory of the COVID pandemic in Ontario. Misinformation and conspiracy theories were swirling on the internet. Tuffin saw a connection. “People were feeling disconnected and looking for something to do. It was very easy to get pulled into black holes,” she says. What was lacking, Tuffin and her peers observed, were opportunities for people to channel their impatience for change into positive social action.
So Tuffin and her collaborators settled on a solution: Peterborough needed a stronger culture of volunteerism, and a new volunteer centre would help deliver it. Together, they founded Volunteer Peterborough, a non-profit with the goal of “identifying and overcoming barriers to volunteerism, while also celebrating those who participate.”
If Volunteer Peterborough succeeds in its mission, it’ll be bucking national trends, which show a stark decline in civic participation in recent years. As Canadians grapple with a cost-of-living crisis that leaves them with less free time, they’re also falling prey to algorithmic social media feeds that lure them into internet bubbles and away from their local communities.
In Peterborough, Tuffin and her peers saw the impacts: a social fabric that was fraying as local charities struggled to stay afloat. They planned to help the situation by supporting people to find volunteer opportunities that matched their skills and interests.
And, Tuffin hoped, their new volunteer centre might just help divert those who are vulnerable to anti-social misinformation away from rabbit holes. “I thought, if they can do volunteering and not end up on a chat group spreading hate, then there was hope.”
Canadians are volunteering less – and that’s a problem
In 2018, Canadians contributed about five billion hours of volunteer labour across the country. That’s according to the Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating, which Statistics Canada has administered since 1985.
The agency released preliminary findings from its most recent iteration of the survey last year, and the numbers were sobering. In 2023, Canadians contributed about 4.1 billion hours of volunteer labour. In just five years, almost a billion hours of annual volunteer hours had evaporated – a drop of 18%. The number of Canadians who volunteer decreased by 8% over the same time frame. For Canadian charities that need phones answered, fundraisers planned, and committee chairs filled, that spells trouble.
In Peterborough, a well-loved annual children’s hockey tournament folded this year after operating for more than six decades. One reason for the closure? A lack of volunteers.
Almost half of charities surveyed by Carleton University’s Charity Insights Canada Project in April 2026 reported not having enough volunteers to meet their needs. When asked what impact that had on their operations, most charities reported that it meant increased workloads for staff and existing volunteers. Another common impact of the volunteer shortage is a reduced ability to deliver services and programs.
Volunteerism is proxy for the quality or nature of our democracy.
Megan Conway, Volunteer Canada
But the implications of declining volunteerism go much deeper than the immediate impacts on charities, according to Megan Conway, the president and CEO of Volunteer Canada. As she sees it, volunteerism is “proxy for the quality or nature of our democracy.” At a webinar earlier this year, she said that “it’s a measure of how connected and engaged we are in building the kinds of communities and country we want to see.” As fewer people show up to volunteer, “we weaken the connective tissue that holds communities – and our overall democracy – together.”
Canadians are experiencing increasing levels of loneliness, disconnection, mistrust, and polarization, Conway points out. In the face of all the challenges confronting our society – from climate change to social inequity – that’s a recipe for hopelessness. But volunteering offers a way to break that cycle. “The only way you can bust through [hopelessness] is by doing small things that contribute to a change,” Conway says. It’s a way “to get out and experience the world and understand what’s happening in it in a way that is critically important in today’s time.”
The good news: Canadians still want to volunteer
Through their respective experiences promoting volunteerism, Tuffin and Conway have both arrived at a similar conclusion: if Canadians are volunteering less, it’s not for lack of will. “It’s not because people don’t want to participate,” Conway says. Rather, “the infrastructure that enables [volunteering] to happen is very fragmented and sparse.”
Many of the service clubs, churches, and other institutions that invited social participation when Conway was growing up are a shadow of their former selves, leaving Canadians with an unclear path into volunteering. “The number one thing I hear from a broad cross-section of Canadians is that they desperately want to participate but that they do not know how.”
The number one thing I hear from a broad cross-section of Canadians is that they desperately want to participate but that they do not know how.
Megan Conway
The realities of Canada’s affordability crisis also restrict what people are able to offer. “Times are tough,” says Christina Balint, the volunteer program coordinator at GreenUp, an environmental non-profit in Peterborough. “A lot of people are struggling just to pay rent, to have money for groceries, for gas. It’s a very tall ask right now to ask people to take extra time out of their day to volunteer.”
Even if community members do have time to volunteer, Tuffin says many are held back by fear and social anxiety. People will sometimes ask her if she thinks they’re “good enough” to volunteer, she says. “We are in a failure-proof society. Nobody wants to not succeed.”
I don’t know if some of the legacy organizations are aware of how they are putting up barriers.
Lois Tuffin, Volunteer Peterborough
Non-profits, too, operate from a place of fear, according to Tuffin. With worries they’ll be found liable if something goes wrong, charities run new volunteers through a gauntlet of training to cover their bases. “I don’t know if some of the legacy organizations are aware of how they are putting up barriers,” she says.
It’s not necessarily the fault of the non-profit sector. Insufficient funding has left many non-profits without the resources to properly manage and support volunteers to ensure that they have a fulfilling experience.
Given these realities, Canadian civil society needs to reframe how it recruits and supports volunteers – and the organizations that facilitate their participation. To this end, Volunteer Canada is leading the development of a national volunteer action strategy to chart a path forward. The plan is expected to be released later this year.
A plethora of ways to get involved
It’s been four years since a hateful tirade against Jagmeet Singh spurred Lois Tuffin to lead a revitalization of volunteering in Peterborough.
On May 6, the fruits of her efforts were on display, as dozens of other non-profit leaders and hundreds of would-be volunteers crowded into the lower level of a downtown mall for Volunteer Peterborough’s third annual “Meet Your Match” fair. Community members browsed opportunities with a diverse set of non-profits – everything from the special-needs hockey team Kawartha Komets to the HIV service agency PARN.
After chatting with the climate action group For Our Grandchildren, recent retiree Barbara Hughes-Banderob signed up to help with the group’s upcoming Home Energy Expo. She says she volunteers because “it feels good. It feels purposeful.” Hughes-Banderob says she does other things to keep healthy and happy in retirement – visiting friends and attending exercise classes, for example. “But volunteering just gives you something totally different,” she says. “That idea of contributing or making a difference or helping, it’s a really good feeling.”
After signing up with For Our Grandchildren, Hughes-Banderob wandered over to another table, striking up a conversation with representatives from the Peterborough Folk Festival.
Over the course of five hours, more than 800 volunteers attended the event. Tuffin says it was their largest crowd yet and demonstrates the appetite among volunteers for a streamlined search process.
It also happened to take place just a few days after the start of the city’s 2026 municipal election, a contest that will likely feature sharp disagreements over how to respond to pressing challenges such as poverty, a faltering local economy, and strained municipal finances.
Tuffin says a couple of candidates for mayor dropped by the volunteer fair. Her message for them? “This is the real Peterborough,” she said. “It’s easy to focus on all the bad things in our community. This event shows the good.”
