Snow Buddies Needed in Brant County

Sunday, 19 January 2020 07:44

The program is looking for kids between the ages of 12 to 18 years old to help seniors and people with disabilities remove snow from the sidewalk.

BRANT COUNTY - Brant County has started a new winter volunteer program for kids to help seniors and people with disabilities.

Snow Buddies is a program for kids ages 12 to 18 years-old to remove snow on sidewalks for people with limited mobility and provide a service to the community.

Recreation Coordinator Sarah Dredge explains how the program started.

"We were finding as the County of Brant, we are a retirement community. A majority of our communities were retirement communities and we were just looking at ways of connecting youth and seniors but it ended up expanding further than just youth and further than just seniors as well, so we were able to connect new people moving into our communities. We were able to connect them with someone who could provide assistance during those large snow falls or ice squalls."

At the moment the program has a shortage of volunteers and more youth are being asked to join. The program allows seniors to continue to live in their own homes and not in retirement homes or other care facilities.

Dredge explains how they distribute the volunteers.

"The Snow Buddies program matches youth or an adult in our community with a senior or a person with disabilities, or someone needing a little extra help shovelling their driveway or their sidewalk. What they do is they come to us and the buddy would request to volunteer in the community and the senior would say, 'I need a little extra help' and what we do is we match those two together based on the geographical location."

Buddies can choose to volunteer their time for community service hours or they can be paid for the work they do based on the price guidelines on their website.

If you would like to know more information about the Snow Buddy program you can contact Dredge at 519-442-1818 or recservices@brant.ca.