Snow Buddy Program Now In Brant County

Thursday, 23 January 2020 at 09:06

A new winter program for youth has come to Brant County. Snow Buddies is a program to help seniors and people with disabilities shovel their driveways and sidewalks.

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

Snow Buddies is a program for youth in Brant from 12 to 18 years old to remove Snow on sidewalks for people with limited mobility and provide a service to the community.

Recreation Coordinator for the County of Brant 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 are asking for more youth to join the Snow Buddies with this service it 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 be paid for the work they have done with the Price guidelines page on their website, if you would like to know more information about the Snow Buddy program you can contact Sarah Dredge at 519-442-1818, or email recservices@brant.ca.