Now that the BC Summer Games in Maple Ridge have come to an end, the legacy of the Games is emerging from the settled dust.
As part of the official Games debriefing process, the Maple Ridge team is making notes of the lessons they learned while hosting the Games, lessons they are going to pass on to the next community to host the Summer Games – Kelowna.
However, Laura Butler, Maple Ridge BC Summer Games president, hopes the local legacy of the Games is the power of volunteerism.
Around 1,700 people volunteered to help out throughout the four days of events.
“Such a fantastic show of support from the community,” Butler said, noting that a lot of volunteers signed up for multiple shifts.
“They signed up for roles in several different directorates and they were basically willing to lend a hand wherever it was needed,” she said. “It was greatly appreciated.”
For Butler, as president, building that volunteer capacity was really important to her. But, as the Games progressed she realized not only was it important for the leadership team to create once-in-a-lifetime memories for the athletes and participants of the Games, but it was just as important to create amazing opportunities for the volunteers, too.
Volunteering, explained Butler, is all about making new friends, trying something different, the giving of personal time, and knowing that the role you play – no matter how small – has a huge impact on all of the athletes.
She is hoping part of the volunteer legacy of the Games is giving that volunteer bug to other people, who haven’t volunteered before.
“Maybe they’ve realized that by giving just a few hours of their time for an event or something that is going on in our community, that little bit of time can have great impact,” Butler said.
Or, she suggested, some might have seen that volunteering is something quite easy to do when you have the time to do it.
“I look at that as legacy,” stated Butler.
It was a long process to get to the end, with members of the leadership team sitting on boards more than a year before the Games took place. But Butler said it’s all been worth it.
She has made many friends during the process – in fact, some she now calls family.
“We leaned on each other, we helped each other, we found solutions for each other, and at the end we celebrated each other,” Butler said, calling the act of volunteering an “amazing gift.”
“Amazing things happen when we all work together for a common goal, and our goal was to host an absolutely fabulous BC Summer Games, and I think we accomplished that.”
