Category: Focus

Volunteers play a key role where public funding falls short, but as Lindsey Coad writes, how much can they do?

It’s 1:20 p.m. and Francoise Leclerc is 40 minutes early for her appointment at the Kidney Foundation in Ottawa’s west end.

The last thing on the mind of Gordon Pearson was that he would be handed a new computer network. As corporate relations director for the Ottawa Food Bank, Pearson had asked Cognos Inc., a software development company, to estimate the cost of a new computer system. For too long staff had been taking down food orders into a ramshackle system of loose papers.

Jennifer Curran has been volunteering her time to community organizations since she was “a wee little girl” in St. John’s, Nfld. When the 31-year-old started law school at the University of Ottawa three years ago, a friend told her that she would be too busy to keep volunteering. Curran was busy, but that didn’t keep her away from the work that she finds so rewarding.