Volunteering regularly can add 7 to 14 good years to a person’s life. It can also improve mental and physical health and increase community connections and investment. Volunteering benefits everyone!
In 2019, the Walla Walla Valley experienced destructive flooding and needed numerous volunteers to help sandbag to mitigate the water damage to the community. David Lopez, Director of the Center for Humanitarian Engagement (CHE) at Walla Walla University connected with the Director of the United Way of the Blue Mountains, Christy Lieuallen, and they were able to assemble students and community members to do the work. This was the beginning of the Blue Mountain Volunteer Corps (BMVC).
After the floods, came the COVID-19 Pandemic and BMVC had hundreds more volunteers join to help with the vaccination clinics. Now, BMVC had over a thousand volunteers who were ready to be mobilized for both large and small volunteer projects in the valley.
Before BMVC was assembled, the United Way received funding for the GetConnected volunteer platform located on their website. This platform enables potential volunteers to sign up and find a volunteer opportunity in the community. It also allows local non-profits and civic organizations to create their own pages on the site and list their volunteer opportunities in one central location that is easy for anyone to find.
Lopez and Lieuallen decided to combine the volunteers from BMVC with the GetConnected platform to create a central location where volunteers and local organizations can find each other for volunteer projects. The partnership was made, and the work continued.
Blue Zones Project met with Lieuallen and Lopez to help promote volunteerism in the community. They assembled the BMVC committee including Director for Community Engagement at Whitman College, Abby Juhasz; community advocate, Nadine Stecklein; Engagement Coordinator for the United Way, Cheyenne Smith; Volunteer Coordinator for BMAC Food Bank, Yvonne Segovia; Walla Walla Community College Food Bank Coordinator, Becca Tibbetts; Asst. Director of the Water & Environmental Center, Drew Trogstad-Isaacson, and student leaders from both Whitman and WWU.
The committee’s goal is to continue to streamline volunteerism in the community to make it easily accessible to everyone. In the spring of 2023, the committee organized a volunteer fair with over 40 non-profits and civic organizations present. The fair attracted over 200 attendees. The event also helped local organizations see the value of adding their volunteer opportunities to the BMVC website so volunteers can find them 365 days a year.
The three local colleges have an annual event called Tri-College Volunteer Day where students from each school go out into the community for a day to perform several volunteer activities. The BMVC committee combined efforts with the schools and added community members to the event to volunteer with the students. The event is now called the Tri-College Community Day and 300 students and locals volunteered together last year at over 20 sites.
The BMVC committee has also hosted two luncheons for local volunteer coordinators to connect with each other and to support the work they do. These efforts are poised to continue and to become more formalized in the months to come. The hope is more volunteer coordinators will join the committee and continue to support the streamlining of volunteerism in the community. It will benefit all of us.
