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Volunteering wasn’t something Stephanie Shyshka did to pad a resumé. She grew up in Tofield, Alta., where volunteering was just what people did as part of rural community life. She first got a taste of volunteering through her regional 4-H chapter. By the time she was 12, she was visiting nursing homes and playing cards with seniors. Later, as a teenager, she mentored students at a school in Edmonton’s downtown core through BGCBigs (formerly the Boys & Girls Clubs of Canada and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada).

Volunteers have long been the backbone of rural and small-town communities like Shyshka’s. Whether supporting non-profits, maintaining local facilities from sports fields to cemeteries, or providing critical services, they play a vital role in sustaining both the infrastructure and social fabric of these areas.

When Shyshka can carve out time, she still volunteers — but fitting it into her schedule as a full-time Augustana student, part-time veterinary technologist and mom to a toddler is a challenge. Fortunately, she found an interesting solution.

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Sarah Skinner, ’10 BA, a program manager at the , has been on both sides of the volunteer equation. First, as an Augustana student, she did a Community Service-Learning (CSL) placement with the BRWA. That experience led to a full-time job after graduation, and for the past 15 years, Skinner has welcomed Augustana students — including Shyshka — doing their CSL placements.

Augustana’s CSL program connects students to a range of community organizations in Camrose, combining coursework with volunteer work. Students who participate in the program complete approximately 20 hours of service, which benefits organizations like the BRWA and provides students with practical experience and opportunities to build community connections.

“We are a small, ambitious group wanting to do different things in terms of watershed management, education and stewardship,” Skinner says of the BRWA. “The opportunity to bring on CSL students is valuable because it allows us to take on projects that we wouldn’t have the capacity to otherwise.” While at the alliance, Shyshka researched and wrote content for the BRWA’s blog series as part of her capstone course for her environmental science degree.

Jayla Lindberg (’06 BSc) who oversees the student advising and experiential learning team at Augustana, has seen student participation in CSL fluctuate. “The world that students live in now, compared to 10 years ago, is significantly different. Many of them are working extra jobs, trying to make ends meet,” she explains. “The cost of living is high. The cost of university is high.” Given those economic pressures, Lindberg says she understands why even 20 hours of volunteer work may seem like a big ask for students who already have busy schedules.

Shyshka concurs: “I absolutely would do more volunteering if there was the ability to do things remotely or outside the traditional banking hours,” she says. “If there was something that I could do, say, between 6 and 7 p.m. when my partner’s home and he’s watching our little guy. But there are limitations.”

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According to Clark Banack, professor of social sciences at Augustana and director of the Alberta Centre for Sustainable Rural Communities (ACSRC) at the ÌìÑÄÉçÇø, smaller communities like Camrose have been seeing a decline in volunteer participation for years. And it poses a significant threat to their social and economic stability.

Banack good-naturedly rejects any suggestion that he is the go-to expert, but he has thought about why volunteerism is on the decline and what it means for service delivery, recreational activities, community programming and more in places like Camrose.

Last year, Banack and research assistant Meredith Jevne (’24 BA) authored a report prepared for the by the ACSRC and based on one-on-one interviews with 27 people who represent 20 different rural municipalities across Alberta.

“What we found were persistent declining trends in volunteerism across rural and small-town Alberta,” says Banack. “That’s consistent with the research across most of the world right now. This is not a rural Alberta or Canada issue. This is happening across most developed nations.”

But the smaller the community, the bigger the threat posed by declining volunteerism. “In small and rural communities, volunteering is hugely important. And it has been since the beginning,” Banack explains. He points to the vital role volunteers play not only in organizing and delivering community programming, youth activities, and special events, but also in the upkeep of spaces that, in big cities, would be handled by paid staff.

“In the smaller communities where the municipality doesn’t have the capacity, volunteer groups do it,” says Banack.

The role that volunteers play in providing critical services is surprising to people raised in urban centres. Rural residents rely on volunteer-driven initiatives such as firefighting, victim services and Family and Community Support Services to provide crucial support in emergencies and day-to-day social services.

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Banack’s report cites a 2022 Statistics Canada report that noted that more than 65 per cent of Canadian non-profit organizations were experiencing a shortage of volunteers and nearly 36 per cent had issues retaining volunteers.

Is the COVID-19 pandemic to blame for these statistics? Yes and no, says Banack. “To be clear, volunteerism was declining before COVID. But in almost every case, COVID made things worse.”

Banack points to three key factors behind this decline. At the top of the list is lack of free time, as economic pressures and changing social norms have led more adults to work outside the home full time.

In 2021, two-income couples accounted for 68 per cent of all two-parent families with young children in Canada. “That’s relatively new,” says Banack. “If both people are working all the time and coming home tired and having to get food on the table for the kids and all the rest, the amount of time and energy they have to dedicate to volunteering is less.” Today’s parents are also more likely to enroll their children in multiple extracurricular activities, from athletics and arts programs to special camps and clubs, taking up evenings and weekends that even a generation ago might have been spent volunteering at the children’s school or out in the community.

Another factor that affects rural communities in particular is migration patterns that are shifting the demographics of rural populations. From 2019 to 2024, the population of Camrose grew by 3.2 per cent. Banack says that many of those new residents were people from urban centres in search of affordable property, proximity to nature and a quieter lifestyle in a small-town or rural setting — a trend that made headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the people Banack interviewed for his report noted that while newcomers can provide economic benefits to the community, they don’t always recognize that volunteerism is what sustains the small-town charm they were drawn to in the first place.

“They’re coming from an environment where most of the services and programming are provided by the municipality,” he says. “And they don’t realize that, in a smaller community, volunteers have to step up and make them happen.”

The third factor that Banack highlights applies to rural and urban communities: the broader societal trend toward individual interests and away from communal ones. Social scientists have been writing about it for decades. One northern Alberta rural councillor and longtime volunteer who spoke to Banack for his report referred to young people today as “the generation of me” and lamented that they weren’t interested in volunteering if it didn’t offer them a personal benefit.

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Despite these challenges, Banack believes there’s potential to reinvigorate volunteerism in small communities — if non-profits and municipal organizations can adapt their strategies to changing social dynamics.

“Let’s be real. We’re not going to go back to the 1970s where people were volunteering in droves. We have to move forward with fewer volunteers,” he says. “Sometimes organizations need to engage in some strategic planning and ask, ‘What is the essence of what we want to achieve, and how can we do it given the resources we have?’”

Banack recommends that organizations do more to meet potential volunteers where they are. For example, for people with busy schedules who want to contribute to their community but can’t commit much time, flexible, short-term volunteer opportunities can be a solution.

Known as microvolunteering, these activities involve tasks that don’t require a significant time investment and can often be completed online. Some examples include sharing social media posts, sending out fundraising emails or volunteering a few hours at a community event.

Banack says it’s a misconception that young people don’t want to get involved in volunteering. But they do want opportunities that align with their skills and interests. In preparing his report for the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, he came across “many examples and many stories” of organizations that figured out ways to engage younger people in meaningful volunteer work.

Appealing to people’s desire for social connection in a time of increasing social isolation is another strategy he recommends. “I do think we are in an age where there are an awful lot of people who — because of technology and where our attention has been drawn and COVID and all the rest — are looking for an actual real place to belong. Volunteering with an organization can often provide that.”

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The opportunity to volunteer through the CSL program checked off all the boxes for busy student and mom Stephanie Shyshka.

Her placement with the Battle River Watershed Alliance offered a welcome return to a familiar rhythm: giving back. It also allowed her to dig into biodiversity and conservation issues, interview researchers, and write a blog post to raise awareness about endangered bird species in Alberta. And it gave her a deeper understanding of the web of non-profit, governmental, and volunteer efforts working quietly behind the scenes.

“I didn’t realize how many organizations were out there,” she says. “The CSL opportunity was great. I would absolutely recommend it.”

More than anything, it reminded her of the power of connection — to place, to purpose, and to people — that comes with volunteering. “You never know how an opportunity is going to help you down the road,” says Shyshka. “But the relationships you build? That in itself is worth its weight in gold.”