Deachman: Non-profits in Ottawa desperately need drivers. So I volunteered

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Anthony Goodison was telling me about the ghosts he’d encountered, before glaucoma robbed him of his eyesight.

“Oh, yes, several times,” the nearly 82-year-old Britannia resident said. As a youngster growing up in Jamaica, he spent summers at his grandparents’ home in the countryside. That’s where he first met the ghosts.

“Different ghosts?” I asked. “More than one?”

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“Oh, yes,” he replied. “Every summer. Ones I saw and ones I heard. It was very cool, and frightening, too.”

I wanted to learn more, but I had just pulled into the parking lot of the Olde Forge Community Resource Centre on Richmond Road, where Goodison would spend much of the day sharing coffee, discussions, games, lunch, exercise, that sort of thing, with about a dozen other seniors.

The ghosts would have to wait.

As a volunteer driver for Olde Forge that day, my job was to get Goodison and others to and from their various appointments or chores. His was my second drive of the morning; I’d earlier picked up a 77-year-old woman, dropped her off at the Lincoln Fields Metro grocery store and would later take her back home.

In the afternoon, I chauffeured 95-year-old Gwen Simpson, along with her daughter Sylvia, to a physiotherapy appointment in Bells Corners. Following that, I returned to Britannia to pick up Usha Rao, 84, and ferry her to Greystone Village Retirement home in Old Ottawa East, where her husband was staying while he recovered from an injury. After dropping Rao off, it was back to Bells Corners to pick up the Simpsons and drive them to Gwen’s Ambleside home, then back to Olde Forge to get Anthony and, hopefully, hear more about the ghosts.

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Olde Forge’s mission is to keep seniors and adults with disabilities in their homes and out of hospitals or long-term care as long as is safely possible. “But there’s a point where they need a minimal amount of support to be able to do that,” explains executive director Colleen Taylor. “That might be somebody doing their laundry or washing their floors, or taking them shopping or to appointments, or bringing someone to our adult day program. They might need Meals on Wheels.

“Whatever we can do in the community to maintain support services and keep people comfortably and safely at home as long as they want to be there, that’s our goal.”

For the last handful of years, however, efforts to help their 1,500 clients have been hamstrung by a desperate shortage of volunteer drivers. As a result, clients in need of transportation — the centre organizes about 250 rides a week — are increasingly having their requests turned down.

The reasons for the shortage are multifold, says Taylor. Provincial funding that pays some of the costs of the organization’s transportation program hasn’t kept up with inflation. The mileage expense the centre offers drivers doesn’t quite cover the cost of gas. There are simply more seniors who need such services. Meanwhile, people in their 60s who used to make up much of the volunteer workforce are often still working themselves, or, if retired, are busy with other activities.

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“Sixty is the new 40,” says Taylor. “People are healthier at 65. They’re travelling the world and using their retirement dollars. They’re getting remarried at 60, taking up new sports and hobbies. They have more options now.

“So even though we know that volunteering is good for you, people are off doing other things. They’re starting new lives. So the average age of our volunteers is not 60, it’s more like 75.”

Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the centre particularly hard, with many would-be volunteers, especially older ones, reluctant to be physically close to strangers. Taylor says the centre has been unable to return to its pre-COVID numbers, when it had 20 volunteer drivers. Today, it has half as many.

It’s not just Olde Forge facing these issues: the entire volunteer sector has been similarly struck.

“All charities lost people because of COVID, and we’re an aging population so there’s more demand,” echoes Mark Kahan, who is in charge of volunteer recruitment for the Canadian Cancer Society’s Wheels of Hope program. The program provides cancer patients with rides to and from treatment appointments.

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The downturn in volunteerism, says Kahan, has occurred across the country. The numbers in Ottawa are indicative of that trend: In 2019, before the pandemic, Wheels of Hope had 304 clients in Ottawa and 89 volunteer drivers. By last year, its client base had increased by about nine per cent, to 331, while the number of volunteer drivers over that same period decreased by more than 30 per cent, to 61. And like Olde Forge, Wheels of Hope is having to turn down ride requests.

The hoops I had to jump through to be a volunteer driver were hardly onerous: a police check, an online driver’s licence check and accessibility training course, and a brief interview with Laura Coverett, Olde Forge’s manager of transportation and home services.

Judging by my single day as a volunteer driver, the benefits from doing it are both altruistic and selfish. I was glad to help four people get where they had to go and back home safely. I’m also pleased that doing it meant that four requests for drives weren’t turned down. The reasons behind the drive were significant to those who needed them, and all four explained to me how Olde Forge’s services, specifically its transportation services, have improved their lives.

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On a purely self-serving note, each of my four passengers enriched my day by sharing their stories and connecting me with people I wouldn’t likely otherwise meet. His ghosts aside, Anthony, for example, told me of his passion for music. On Tuesday evenings, he sings in a blind choir, and is fond of the musical numbers from Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music.

“Are you a tenor? Baritone?” I asked.

“I just sing,” he replied. “My favourite is Let’s Go Fly A Kite.”

Usha shared with me her love of cooking, and told me about how she and her husband like watching golf, tennis and football — the Redblacks in particular — on TV. Long ago, she said, they used to take friends and family visiting from India on long drives.

“What do you mean by long drives?” I asked.

“Through Canada and the United States.”

Gwen, meanwhile, used to fly Cherokee airplanes out of the Carp airport. That was when she was in her 30s — after the triplets she gave birth to in 1960 briefly gained her prominence in local newspapers, including this one. The irony of the Cherokees, she jokes, was that her husband, Stewart, serving at the time with the Royal Canadian Air Force (later part of the amalgamated Canadian Forces), didn’t fly. “He used to joke that he only flew a desk.”

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My driving day ended at around 3 p.m., with Anthony telling me ghost stories. There were the phantoms he heard, in the twilight of a rural gully, a story that breathlessly galloped in his telling. He also described the one he saw step from inside the trunk of a tree, an apparition that he worried might be the fabled Blackheart Man, a character who purportedly harvested children’s hearts and other organs.

He started to tell me of other ghosts he’d witnessed, but we’d arrived at his home, and to be honest, I wanted to linger a bit longer with the idea of the Blackheart Man. And so I helped him into his building, where we shook hands and went our separate ways. But if you want to hear more stories, they’re easy to find. Become a volunteer driver.

Visit oldeforge.ca or volunteercancer.ca for more information.

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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