April 24-30, 2022 is National Volunteer Week and because Zippaport is completely and utterly reliant on our volunteers, we’d like to take this opportunity to recognize and appreciate and gush over our incredible volunteers.
Our sewists are a group of incredible women who work magic with their sewing machines. Over the past few months they have sewn hundreds of shirts! Most of our sewing fairies live in the GTA – both east and west. Sometimes we drive shirts out to Durham region, use relatives’ houses as a dropoff spot, meet in a carpool lot in Oakville or at Sherway Gardens or pop shirts onto a front porch. We’ve even sent shirts directly to Saskatechewan to be sewn and returned to us. Thank you to Michelle, Marg, Yvette, Erica, Trish, Louise, Lisa, Cathy, Faiza, Mieke’s mom and Kristy who keep our shirts zippered!
Our webmaster has kindly donated her time to first build our website, and then unexpectedly to create a shop so that families can choose their own shirts. We are eternally grateful for Amanda’s patience and flexibility and super skill at keeping our website going.
We’ve recently realized that by pre-packaging our shirts saves a TON of time when sending out orders. It may not seem like a huge thing, but having them folded and packaged is incredibly helpful. Christa has folded and packaged over 100 shirts for us over the past few months and it is so helpful!
Our outreach manager, Louise, has taken Zippaport to a whole new level. Louise has worked tirelessly to get us media attention, to spread the word about our shirt drive, to find us sewing volunteers, and to bring new hospitals on board to distribute our shirts. Louise is so incredibly resourceful and passionate about Zippaport, and our growth would not be possible without her support.
Before we post any shirts on our website, we photograph them and format them for the website. Jenny recently volunteered to help with shirt photographs, and if you’ve seen our social media feed over the past few weeks, you’ll see her work. She has an incredible skill and eye and we are crossing our fingers and toes that she’ll keep stylizing shirts for us.
Our youngest volunteers may be a bit more in the realm of “volun-told”, but their contribution is so valued. Sadie is our in-house model and Colin is our inventory-helper, junior photographer and emergency shirt packager.
If you have a skill that we could leverage, or want to get involved, we’d love to hear from you!
~julie
#NVW2022 #EmpathyInAction #VolunteersBringHeart