Free and Willing.
It is celebrating its 75th birthday this year. By "it," I mean the Women's Auxiliary Volunteers.
Volunteers who hold the hands of sick children while their parents weep.
The idea for the Women’s Auxiliary Volunteers — WAV for short — was born out of what you might call a pillow talk. Two doctors were chatting about a library they needed, available for two thousand dollars, but the money simply wasn’t there. One of the doctors — a woman — organised a bazaar and brought in twice the amount. Both doctors recognised this kind of effort as a necessity, and so the whole project stood on voluntary feet: unpaid commitment, plain and simple.
Over 75 years of voluntary service at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, a chain of generations has formed. Children become parents. Parents become grandparents. And some, later in life, return to the Women’s Auxiliary Volunteers as volunteers themselves.
Worth noting: in everyday speech, and among those who do it, “volunteer work” means simply unpaid work. People spend many hours of their time supporting children at Sick Kids Hospital — mentally, emotionally, just by being there.
Out of sheer curiosity, I wanted to know how large or how small this unpaid contribution to hospital life in Canada actually is.
For 2023, Statistics Canada shows a remarkable figure: 35 million hours contributed by volunteers in hospitals across the country.
Beyond the bare statistical numbers, it is people who stand at the centre of things. For some folks, the very term “volunteer work” is already a red flag.
“What do you mean, unpaid work? What on earth is that?”
Well — if those 35 million hours were suddenly no longer contributed each year, the answer to “What on earth is that?” would be: a catastrophe. Mind you, back in 2013, this commitment to voluntary service collapsed by a full 47 per cent.
Anyone who has ever come out as a volunteer will hardly complain about that decision. Otherwise, there would be precious few people left who step up without hesitation and get involved. The reward for this kind of work cannot be measured in hard currency. It is, rather, the quiet recognition of having been a support, a listener, a fellow human being to someone. Moments like that cannot be squeezed into a dollar figure.
In Switzerland, volunteer work is mostly organised through clubs — what we call a Verein. Small Switzerland is absolutely teeming with them, as if there were no tomorrow. My own time in a neighbourhood association and a local business association was, on the one hand, genuinely instructive and, on the other, an excellent network of people who likewise gave of themselves freely and willingly. Just like that.
The Women’s Auxiliary Volunteers have filled three quarters of a century with warmth for the children at Sick Kids. And they will carry on doing so — voluntarily.
Not only because they are volunteers, but because they are humans.
Free and willing.
